by Lucy Worsley
First published 2023
Agatha Christie sold more books than almost any writer who ever lived, yet she spent decades insisting she was nothing more than an ordinary housewife. Lucy Worsley, a literary and cultural historian, sets out to explain that contradiction. Drawing on personal letters and papers rarely seen by researchers, Worsley builds a portrait of a woman born in 1890 into a society with firm rules about what women could and could not do. The Christie who emerges here loved fast cars, went surfing in Hawaii, and engaged seriously with the new science of psychology, using it to navigate devastating mental illness. She was, as Worsley puts it, thrillingly modern. Yet she performed the role of a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure for most of her public life. Worsley's biography is also an argument: that Christie overcame real obstacles of class and gender to become an astonishingly successful working woman. The book gives readers both the facts of Christie's career and a clear-eyed account of why she worked so hard to make those facts invisible.
Genres: biography, literary-criticism, 20th-century, british-literature, womens-studies, cultural-studies
Vibes: empowering, intimate, revelatory, scholarly, thought-provoking
Tropes: hidden-identity, overcoming-obstacles, public-versus-private-self
Setting: Hawaii, Britain
Period: 1890s, 20th century, Edwardian era
432 pages · Paperback · Pegasus Crime
Content warnings: mental-illness