Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman

Excellent book by a well known author. Meticulously researched, it has a lot of new information about AC that I didn't know before. The author really has a talent for making you feel a part of the story and I was sorry when the book ended.

A good read about the life of a very interesting, mysterious and prolific writer who created a genre of murder mystery writing that has never been eclipsed by subsequent writers, only copied and emulated. She lived her own mysteries. Essential reading for Agatha Christie fans.

A thoughtful biography by a good historian, good writer. Lucy Worsley pops up in a lot of places these days. Her writing gives good insights and reads easily. It is thoughtful and reads at a slower pace than an Agatha Christie mystery. We get some good understanding of the life of a very popular, prolific writer. I enjoyed the book and learned a lot I didn't know about a writer than I enjoy.

I have loved Lucy Worsley on BBC historical shows and didn't know she was an author. I was thrilled to learn she wrote a biography of Agatha Christie. There is something extraordinary about this book: the biographer's perspective and opinions can be found on many of its pages. This could be intrusive or annoying in a biography, but the opposite is true here because it's the witty and brilliant Worsley. What a great person to guide you on this fascinating journey. Agatha defies expectations. She is modest but not, a self-described housewife who was often found on archeological digs in Iraq, a writer of uneven quality who also produced major works. The elderly woman in our mind was once a lovely debutante, a lover of swimming in the sea and a woman who made some bad choices with major consequences. Yet she also led what you might think of as a rather normal family life, with typical tears and joys. This book was a true pleasure to read. Now I must read Worsley's other books.

I bought this Agatha Christie biography for my mom, who loves her books, and she really enjoyed it. It gave great insight into Agatha Christie’s life and writing, and was a wonderful companion to the novels she already loves. Such a thoughtful gift for any fan.

If you are an Agatha Christie fan or just curious about her, you need to read this book. Lucy Worsley has done a lot of research and written a book so well that you feel like you’ve known Agutha forever. There were a lot of things I didn’t know about Agatha. She was quite an individual in her time. I strongly suggest you read this book. It is a great one!

If you love Christie then this is a book for you.

The first third of this biography is uncommonly sprightly and spunky, but the last two thirds settle into a more tedious narrative style. I found the author's emphasis on Christie's unusual success as a woman author convincing. Likewise her sympathetic portrayal of the reasons for Christie's famous 11-day disappearance in 1926. Overall, informative and a fairly good read.

Wonderful bio of Agatha Christie! Very well researched, well written and includes some great photos from all periods of her life. I would definitely recommend this book to lovers of detective novels.

Detailed description of the fascinating life of Agatha Christie.

Excellent book.

Readers might have visualized Agatha Christie as a wealthy Englishwoman dressed in tweeds, who had inherited a country estate full of gardeners and gamekeepers, along with a manor staffed by several maids and a butler. Perhaps they also imagined that she had a team of assistants lurking in a cottage, who helped her in churning out her bestsellers – even as she spent her weekends riding with her husband and handing out buttered scones to her numerous grandchildren. Lucy Worsley’s new book ‘Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman’ shows that such notions are quite wrong. While Agatha appears quintessentially English, her father Frederick Miller was an American who chose to settle at the small seaside resort of Torquay in England. Agatha’s mother Clara Boehmer had been born in Dublin to an English mother and a German father. To add to the complexity, the family tree given in the beginning of this book reveals that Clara’s mother was the younger sister of Frederick’s stepmother. “The complicated families often found in Agatha’s fiction,” remarks Worsley, “began life close to home.” Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) might have been born with the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth. In the author’s words, “Little Agatha seems to have wanted for nothing that an overstuffed, over-furnished, overconfident high-Victorian household could offer.” Sadly, her idyllic childhood ended at the tender age of eleven, when her indulgent father died and her family’s income declined. Rather than give her a formal schooling, Agatha’s mother preferred that she should learn “music, French, conversation and ‘character.’” As the First World War broke out in 1914, Agatha volunteered to work as a nurse (and she famously picked up a detailed knowledge of various types of poisons). The same year she got married to army officer Archibald Christie, whose name she bore throughout her life. In 1919, Agatha gave birth to Rosalind, her only child. A few years later, Agatha’s first marriage ended in a divorce and she went on to marry archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was fourteen years younger than her. She frequently travelled with Max and his team to excavation sites in Iraq and Syria – and many of her stories were inspired by her journeys and experiences during such expeditions… This book consists of 41 chapters divided into ten sections, roughly corresponding to the decades and important events in Agatha’s long life. There is an evocative black and white photograph of Agatha at the start of each section, besides two sets of colour plates containing more photos of Agatha along with her family and friends. Some of the sections and chapters are named after Christie’s works, e.g. the chapter which talks about her relationship with her daughter Rosalind is titled “A Daughter’s A Daughter.” The very last chapter is poignantly titled “After the Funeral.” Author Lucy Worsley – who is a historian by profession – has made extraordinary efforts to gather information from a variety of sources, ranging from books and newspapers to church registers and asylum records. She has also accessed archival material and private correspondence, apart from holding personal conversations with a handful of individuals who can recall interacting with Christie prior to her death in 1976. The author has taken pains to organize and present the fruits of her research in a highly readable manner. Lady Antonia Fraser (undoubtedly a brilliant woman herself), rightly describes this book as “one brilliant woman writing about another…” “Max once described his wife as combining ‘outer diffidence with a massive inner confidence’, and there are sometimes hints that her public ‘shyness’ was less a genuine character trait than a weapon.” Worsley shares many insights into Agatha’s personal life, which impacted her work. “Despite the fact that she’s had just the one child…she still managed to create a large, complicated family of which she was the centre.” The author has covered not just Christie’s life, but also her works, in her magnificent sweep – for instance, she describes ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ as “one of the greatest detective novels of all time” and quotes copiously from several Christie books. She probes into minute details of celebrated detectives like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple as well as a host of minor characters, to build up her story (though she does let out a spoiler or two). She also identifies numerous “tricks” employed by Christie in her books, including what she calls recycling of a good plot; “the reader simply can’t believe that she might be playing the same game twice.” The only flaw I have found in this book is on page 44, where the author says that Archibald Christie was “born on 30 September 1889 in Peshawar, then in Bengal, India, now in Pakistan.” I am sure that neither Poirot nor Marple, much less Christie herself, could have found Peshawar in Bengal, since it lies in north-west Pakistan east of the Khyber Pass! In conclusion, let me say that the Eloquent Lucy turns out to be a perfect match for the Elusive Agatha. By the time you finish reading this book, your wish list will be swelling as you will have a strong urge to read or re-read most, if not all, of Agatha Christie’s books.

When I was growing up, there was no concept of Young Adult fiction, so I progressed from Enid Blyton to whatever my mum was reading, which included (thankfully for my future career!) Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland (something she still denies), Mary Stewart and crime, which meant primarily Agatha Christie. In fact, in my late teens and early twenties, I devoured almost every book Agatha Christie had ever written, including those she published as Mary Westmacott. Me and my mum would swap them between us, vying to discover whodunnit first, and endlessly dissecting the plots. Then I got a bit up myself reading-wise, and went into my ‘literary’ phase and didn’t read any Christie for decades. The first-class BBC adaptations of some of the stand-alone Christie books sent me back to a selective reading, but I have not read Poirot or Marple in a very long time – and I’ve never been fond of any of the tv or film adaptations of them. More recently, I have been re-reading Lord Peter Wimsey and remembering my early love of crime from the golden age, so when Lucy Worsley brought out a biography of Agatha Christie, I had it on pre-order – not least because Worsley is one of my auto-buy historians. I think I’d call this a revisionist bio, in that it sets out to revise and review some of the myths that have grown up about Christie’s life, partly because access to her archive has been closely managed by her family, but more importantly because it takes a very different view on the ‘big’ event of Christie’s life – her disappearance. Worsley, as you would expect, has consulted every source she could get her hands on, and very importantly, has been given access to the extensive archive of letters, notebooks, photos etc. She is a first-class historian with a painstaking approach to sources, to cross-checking, to questioning and re-investigating, and as a result does indeed come up with quite a different Agatha Christie than the one that we have come to accept. Is it the real one? Lucy Worsley concludes that we’ll never know the real one – that Christie was a master of deceit and deception in her private life as well as in her writings. How she reaches that conclusion makes for a highly readable and entertaining biography, so I’m not going to spoil it! I loved this – of course I did! I particularly enjoyed the insights and connections that Worsley makes between Christie’s books and her personal life. Why did Jane Marple come into her life so late, and why did her initially acerbic, rather unlikeable character soften? And Poirot? He served so many purposes in his long career, at times slick, at times troubled, at times on the verge of badly written, but all of this is put in a fascinating context that made me jump onto Amazon and download two of the books – which I’ve nearly finished. So too with Miss Marple. I’m not sure about Tommy and Tuppence, but there were so many stand-alone books mentioned in passing that I am sure I’ll be re-reading Christie on and off for the foreseeable. Whether you want a new take on Christie’s life or a better understanding of her books, or if you are new to both, I highly recommend this.