Smith's Lesser Spotted Stories

Dee Gordon highlights the work of Dodie Smith, one of our most successful novelists and playwrights

- By Dee Gordon

Dodie Smith was a Lancashire lass, born in 1896, and is mainly known for her two most famous novels - I Capture the Castle, and, of course, The Hundred and One Dalmatians. But there was a lot more to her than that.

After moving to London in 1910, when her mother remarried, Dodie auditioned for Rada, aiming to become an actress. However, she got sacked from her first job in a musical comedy, which paid £2 per week, and struggled to make a living with end-of-pier farces and army concert parties while living in a girls' hostel in London.

Rather than continue playing parlour maids, and to improve her finances, Dodie switched to running the art gallery at Heal's, the furniture shop, and found she enjoyed selling and travelling to buy goods for the store.

But she also tried her hand at writing a play, called Autumn Crocus, which she sold to director Basil Dean, someone she had met when he was an actor. Her fee was £100, and the play's success inspired such headlines as "Shopwoman Dramatist ... Hit of the Season" in the London Daily News. It ran for a year in the West End, making her rich pretty much overnight, and was later filmed, inspiring her to write a succession of light comedies with Dear Octopus (1938), starring John Gielgud, being her biggest triumph. This ran for two years and secured its place in repertory for the next 60 years.

At the height of her fame, just before leaving Heal's in 1933, Dodie bought a flat in Dorset Square and, two years later, a large, thatched cottage in rural Finchingfield, Essex for £435.