'The Small-Girl's Proust' | Anna Leszkiewicz
Briefly

Anyone reading through my press-cuttings book would believe the novel had had a great critical success and a great commercial one. But the fact remains that [I] have been bitterly disappointed; and the weeks which followed publication were amongst the most unhappy in my life.
The book's popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow.
I Capture the Castle, now considered a Young Adult classic, a very English comedy, a touching romance, and ... remains her most charismatic work. Yet it has never received the critical treatment Smith hoped for.
Read at The New York Review of Books
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