#6Degrees of Separation From I Capture the Castle to A Wake of Crows

It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for 6 Degrees of Separation!

Here’s how it works: a book is chosen as a starting point by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate says: Books can be linked in obvious ways – for example, books by the same authors, from the same era or genre, or books with similar themes or settings. Or, you may choose to link them in more personal or esoteric ways: books you read on the same holiday, books given to you by a particular friend, books that remind you of a particular time in your life, or books you read for an online challenge. Join in by posting your own six degrees chain on your blog and adding the link in the comments section of each month’s post.   You can also check out links to posts on Twitter using the hashtag #6Degrees.

This month’s starting book is I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. As usual, it’s a book I haven’t read – although I get the feeling everyone else in the book world has! Given it has a 17-year-old protagonist, Cassandra Mortmain, it would probably today be classed as a Young Adult novel but Dodie Smith is also famous for her children’s book, The Hundred and One Dalmations.

So my first link is to another author – Lynne Reid Banks – who wrote children’s books, notably The Indian in the Cupboard, but also adult novels, the most well-known probably being The L-Shaped Room. (I remember owning this paperback edition with its evocative cover.) Lynne Reid Banks also wrote a biography of the Brontës, Dark Quartet, the relevance of ‘quartet’ being that it includes Branwell Brontë, not just his more famous sisters.

Another author to have been fascinated by Branwell is Daphne du Maurier. Her book, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, charts how Branwell’s ‘precocious flame of genius flickered and burned low’ resulting in his early death from a combination of laudanum and alcohol.

However, Branwell is alive and well, at least in his sister Charlotte’s memories, in Bella Ellis’s historical fiction series which imagines the Brontë sisters as amateur lady detectives. The third and final book in the series is A Gift of Poison.

A Gift of Poison is set in 1847 at the point when Emily and Anne (but not Charlotte) have had their first books – Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey – accepted for publication. Anne’s second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, is probably more well-known.

Anne died in May 1948, her dying words whispered to Charlotte, by now her only surviving sister, being “take courage”. Fittingly, Take Courage is the title of Samantha Ellis’s biography of Anne.

Anne Brontë is buried in Scarborough, a place she loved. The seaside town of Scarborough is also the location for crime novel, A Wake of Crows by Kate Evans.  As it happens, Scarborough has a castle with which fact I hope I have captured your attention!