# The Most Influential Book Rowling Read as a Child Wanting to Be a Writer is Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle'

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Podcast: [Rowling Studies The Hogwarts Professor Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/rowling-studies-the-hogwarts-professor-podcast-6739232)
Published: 2025-12-24T21:43:11+00:00
Episode link: https://hogwartsprofessor.substack.com/p/the-most-influential-book-rowling
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/182328873/41a558677aaeb825235cbff2434716e3.mp3
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Duration seconds: 5098

## Resource

Merry Christmas! In between looking at houses to rent and packing up the Granger house in Oklahoma City, Nick and John put together this yuletide conversation about perhaps the most neglected of Rowling’s influences, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle . John was a reluctant reader, but, while listening to the audio book, reading the Gutenberg.com file on his computer, and digging the codex out of his packed boxes of books, the author of Harry Potter’s Bookshelf was totally won over to Nick’s enthusiasm for Castle. In fact, John now argues that, even if Rowling didn’t read it until she was writing Goblet of Fire as some have claimed, I Capture the Castle may be the best single book to understand what it is that Rowling-Galbraith attempts to do in her fiction. Just as Dodie Smith has her characters explain overtly and the story itself delivers covertly, When Rowling writes a story, like Smith it is inevitably one that is a marriage of Bronte and Austen, wonderfully accessible and engaging, but with important touches in the ‘Enigmatist’ style of Joyce and Nabokov, full of puzzles and twists in the fashion of God’s creative work (from the Estecean logos within every man [John 1:9] continuous with the Logos ) rather than a portrait of creation per se. Can you say ‘non liturgical Sacred Art’? And if you accept, per Nick’s cogent argument, that Rowling read Castle many times as a young wannabe writer? Then this book becomes a touchstone of both Lake and Shed readings of Rowling’s work — and Smith one of the the most important influences on The Presence. Merry Christmas, again, to all our faithful readers and listeners! Thank you for your prayers and notes of support and encouragement to John and for making 2025 a benchmark year at Hogwarts Professor. And just you wait for the…

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