Dodie Smith

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Standard Name: Smith, Dodie
Birth Name: Dorothy Gladys Smith
Nickname: Dodie Smith
Married Name: Dorothy Gladys Beesley
Pseudonym: Carol Anthony
Pseudonym: C. L. Anthony
Pseudonym: Charles Henry Percy
Dodie Smith, best known for writing the beloved children's novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), began her career as a dramatist; she wrote a series of hit plays in the 1930s. In the 1940s she turned to publishing novels (including the best-selling I Capture the Castle in 1948) and spent her last years writing several volumes of autobiography. After the war, DS sometimes experienced difficulties getting her work published or produced; she fell out of favour with critics who found her work too sentimental, charming, and cosy, particularly in contrast to the work of Angry Young Men such as John Osborne and Kingsley Amis . Her biggest successes from this later period were with younger audiences.
Photograph of a blue plaque set up on the stone white-painted ground floor wall of 18 Dorset Square, Marylebone, London NW1 6QB by the St Marylebone Society, reading "Dodie Smith, 1895-1990, Author and Playwright lived here."

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Teresa Deevy
Katie Roche reached print (along with Dodie Smith 's Call It a Day) in Famous Plays of 1935-6, issued in 1936 by Victor Gollancz . In 1939 came her own Three Plays...
Friends, Associates Josephine Tey
JT 's London friends included her agent, David Higham , her publisher, Nico Davies , the writer, artist, and racehorse owner Caroline Ramsden (known as Lena), and theatre people like John Gielgud, Dodie Smith (with...
Friends, Associates Olivia Manning
OM 's friends included a number of fellow-writers: William Gerhardi , Ivy Compton-Burnett (whom she had first met before the war, at a party given by Rose Macaulay , and whose work she deeply admired),...
Intertextuality and Influence J. K. Rowling
Robert Galbraith has his own website, which details his military background and his work first for the military police and then in private security. He says his flamboyant, unusual mother came from Cornwall and went...

Timeline

22 August 1934: Gertrude Jennings's popular family drama...

Women writers item

22 August 1934

Gertrude Jennings 's popular family drama Family Affairs opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.
Gale, Maggie B. West End Women: Women and the London Stage, 1918-1962. Routledge, 1996.
219, 117-19

Texts

Smith, Dodie. “Author’s Foreword”. Autumn Crocus; Service; Touch Wood, W. Heinemann, 1939, p. vii - xiii.
Smith, Dodie. Autumn Crocus. V. Gollancz, 1931.
Smith, Dodie. Bonnet over the Windmill. W. Heinemann, 1937.
Smith, Dodie. Call It a Day. V. Gollancz, 1936.
Smith, Dodie. Call It a Day. Acting ed., S. French, 1937.
Smith, Dodie. Dear Octopus. W. Heinemann, 1938.
Smith, Dodie. I Capture the Castle. Little, Brown, 1948.
Smith, Dodie. It Ends with Revelations. W. Heinemann, 1967.
Smith, Dodie. Letter from Paris. W. Heinemann, 1954.
Smith, Dodie. Look Back with Astonishment. W. H. Allen, 1979.
Smith, Dodie. Look Back with Gratitude. Muller, Blond, and White, 1985.
Smith, Dodie. Look Back with Love. W. Heinemann, 1974.
Smith, Dodie. Look Back with Mixed Feelings. W. H. Allen, 1978.
Smith, Dodie. Lovers and Friends. S. French, 1947.
Smith, Dodie. Service. V. Gollancz, 1932.
Smith, Dodie et al. The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Viking Press, 1956.
Smith, Dodie. The New Moon with the Old. W. Heinemann, 1963.
Smith, Dodie. The Town in Bloom. W. Heinemann, 1965.
Smith, Dodie. Touch Wood. V. Gollancz, 1934.