From a colourful Edwardian childhood in Manchester, Dodie Smith (1896-1990) became a second-rate repertory actress, and then worked at the Everyman Theatre and Heal's before becoming an overnight sensation with her first play Autumn Cross in 1932. She became the most successful female dramatist of her generation with her all-time hit Dear Octopus in 1938, but then left England to spend the war in California with her young, handsome pacifist husband. There Christopher was her closest friend, and she wrote lucrative screenplays and her first novel, I Capture the Castle. Back in postwar Britain, she felt out of touch with the theatre and wrote the children's book which made her an international household name when Disney filmed it, The 101 Dalmations. This biography conjures up not only England in the 20s and 30s, and a Golden Age of British theatre, but also the life of an ambitious, talented, yet vulnerable woman.