I really enjoyed this Biography of possibly the world’s most famous female author. Despite having read nearly all of Agatha Christie’s novels, I didn’t actually know that much about her. I knew about the mysterious disappearance and also that she married an archaeologist who was younger than her but that was pretty much it. When I saw that Lucy Worsley had written a new biography it was a must-read for me.
Official Blurb from the book:
“Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.”
Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, “She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern.” She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.
So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?
She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do. Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It’s also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.
With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.
Blurbs for non-fiction books are definitely getting better. This one really made me want to read the book and I certainly wasn’t disappointed.
Lucy Worsley has a really easy writing style and her prose carries you along effortlessly. I’ve only watched a couple of her television shows but the same enthusiasm that she showed there is also apparent in her writing.
This is an extensively well researched biography and the author also uses Agatha Christie’s own autobiography which helps us to really get a picture of her subject. We learn about her life and how her writing fitted into that and also how her writing arose out of what was happening around her. The subtitle is very true as the biography clearly shows the less well-known side of her character; the retiring woman who would rather not be the centre of attention.
I had only ever seen pictures of her as an elderly woman and so it was fascinating to read about how attractive she was when younger. The work she did during WWI was also interesting and the parallels that Worsley drew with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth as both the women were in a similar situation.
Obviously the most famous part of her life was the mysterious disappearance in 1926 and the biography covers this in detail. A lot of this was new to me although possibly won’t be to people who know more about Agatha Christie. I had no idea that the hunt for her was on such a large scale or that public opinion about it was so negative. Lucy Worsley paints a sympathetic picture of why Agatha felt the need to disappear which seemed very plausible to me.
She doesn’t gloss over the problematic elements of the Christie novels either. She shows Agatha’s Christie’s casual use of racist language and characterisation that would be unthinkable today. She was also very much of her upbringing and the working class were often portrayed in stereotypical ways in her earlier works. However, she also shows that these attitudes did change over time.
Agatha Christie was a much more interesting person than I had imagined. I loved finding out about how adventurous she was. From her coming out season in Cairo, to running archaeological digs in Iraq, she loved to travel and again, these experiences fed into some of her best known novels such as Death on the Nile.
The main interest though for me was Christie’s writing. We see how committed she was to writing and how she constantly kept notebooks with ideas for plots and characters. Her books have always been incredibly popular and Lucy Worsley makes the point that they reflected life for a lot of people at the time. Now, the life that is shown is historical fiction but at the time they were published, they reflected a changing society. Her financial affairs are interesting too, especially the arguments with the US tax authorities
This biography is best read if you have already read a lot of Agatha Christie’s work or if you have a poor memory as there are several spoilers contained in the biography as Lucy Worsley discusses the novels.

This is my tenth book Non-Fiction book so far in 2022 so I’m well on track to hit my Non-Fiction Reader Challenge this year. The Non-Fiction Reader Challenge is hosted at Book’dout and you can find the details of the challenge here