[3] Dodie's childhood home, Kingston House,[4] was at 609 Stretford Road,[5] and faced the Manchester Ship Canal.

Thirdly, her mother had wanted to be an actress, an ambition frustrated except for walk-on parts, once in the company of Sarah Bernhardt.

Smith wrote her first play at the age of ten, and she began acting in minor roles during her teens at the Manchester Athenaeum Dramatic Society.

Other roles after RADA included a Chinese girl in Mr. Wu, a parlour maid in Ye Gods, and a young mother in Niobe, which was directed by Basil Dean, who would later buy her play Autumn Crocus.

[6] Even though Smith had sold a movie script, Schoolgirl Rebels, using the pseudonym Charles Henry Percy,[1] and written a one-act play, British Talent, that premiered at the Three Arts Club in 1924, she still had a hard time finding steady work.

[3] Smith's fourth play Call It a Day was acted by the Theatre Guild on 28 January 1936 and ran for 194 performances.

American critic Joseph Wood Krutch compared it favorably to George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's play Dinner at Eight and Edward Knoblock's Grand Hotel.

"[3] The success of Call It a Day enabled Smith to purchase The Barretts, a cottage near the village of Finchingfield, Essex.

[3] Smith lived for many years in Dorset Square, Marylebone, London, which a blue plaque now commemorates; her date of birth is shown inaccurately as 1895 instead of 1896.

[3] During their American interlude, the couple became friends with writers Christopher Isherwood, Charles Brackett and John Van Druten.

Smith's first play back in London, Letter from Paris, was an adaptation of Henry James's short novel The Reverberator.

Barnes writes of the complicated task in his essay "Literary Executions", revealing among other things how he secured the return of the film rights to I Capture the Castle, which had been owned by Disney since 1949.

Smith had the idea for the novel when one of her friends observed a group of her Dalmatians and said "Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat".