Goudge’s Little White Horse is one of my all-time favourites as is Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet both classified as children’s

Goudge’s Little White Horse is one of my all-time favourites, as is Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet (both classified as children’s books, but don’t let that deter you).The distinctive top note of these diverse novels is that they are all uniquely blithe. None of their authors lets a bit of death or disaster stand in the way of prevailing jauntiness. They are, simply, far too blithe for blokes.It will be intriguing to see what effect the forthcoming film of I Capture the Castle will have on male cinema-goers “I Capture the What?” Precisely Half of you haven’t got a clue. No male I’ve met this week has ever heard of the supreme standard-bearer of “blithe lit”. This company of men includes my editor on these pages, a literary agent and Jamie Byng, head honcho of Canongate who published this year’s Booker Prize winner. Meanwhile my mother, my sister and most of my closest friends rate Dodie Smith’s 1949 bestseller among their all-time favourite works of fiction.

If you think Smith sounds familiar, that’s because she’s now rather more celebrated as the author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Never mind the fact she also wrote several hugely successful plays in the Thirties. (The first one premiered while she was still working at Heals, inspiring the Evening Standard headline “Shop-girl writes West End Hit”.) Disney and co got hold of one of her works and it’s been cute spotted dogs ever since Except among the sisterhood. We cherish Dodie Smith for her spirited account of the Mortmain family in their dilapidated castle: clever Cassandra, whose journal provides the book’s narrative, her mesmerising older sister Rose, and Topaz, the two girls’ artistic stepmother, who puts “velvety inflections on each word”. Then there’s Stephen the family retainer, who looks “like a Greek god”, and Father, who housed his family in a near-derelict castle and once “wrote a very unusual book called Jacob Wrestling, a mixture of fiction, philosophy and poetry”.

It’s the kind of writing where one sister says to the other, “Rose, there isn’t a towel on this earth that could make up for marrying a bearded man that you hate.”Male stomachs may already feel a little queasy at such high-density blitheness Even I felt this could be delicate territory for cinema. One inch too fey, too arch, too darn Mitford with knobs on, and the drama’s down the Swanee. So I am delighted to report that I watched a preview this week and it’s an out-and-out triumph. The skilful adaptation and stellar performances will delight the book’s fans but, crucially, it’s a film men can see without vomiting.I laughed, I cried, and so did my husband.

(This is a man whose idea of a good date movie is Point Blank.) As a further bonus, there’s time enough to read the book, published by Virago, before the film goes on general release in the spring. The evil that is soft furnishings After a glorious day’s flotation on planet Blithe, I crash-landed on planet Earth It was the new brocade curtains that did for me. I had rashly told my husband that if he arranged their assemblage with the nice ladies at John Lewis, I would pay for them. This was before I realised that three sets of bog-standard pleated curtains can set you back £650.