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Search - Agatha Christie: A Biography

Agatha Christie A Biography
Author: Janet Morgan

A superb, immensely readable biography of the most prolific and successful mystery writer of our century. The only authorized biography of Agatha Christie, it has already been hailed by Antonia Fraser (writing in the London Standard) as 'masterly and gripping," and written with "a verve and lucidity worthy of Dame Agatha.&quo... more »t;

Agatha Christie was quiet and reclusive all her life, firm in her belief that the public need know nothing of her but her books. After her death in 1976, her family continued to protect her privacy (they heavily edited her autobiography before allowing its publication in 1977). But in 1980 her daughter, having decided that the time had come for a full account of her mother's life, made available to Janet Morgan all of Dame Agatha's papers, all of her personal effects (intact at Greenway, her house in Devon), and introductions to two hundred of her friends and associates. The result is a definitive and fascinating life.

Agatha Miller was born in 1890 in Torquay, a fashionable seaside resort on the southern coast of England. The youngest of three children -- a much-loved 'afterthought' -- she was educated at home and raised in the conventional middle-class world of tea parties and tennis clubs and country houses that would eventually be the setting for so much of her writing. In 1912 Agatha met Archie Christie. Though they were immediately drawn to each other, their subsequent two-year engagement was stormy in the extreme. It was a signal of doubt -- perhaps a warning of incompatibility -- that might have kept them apart under normal circumstances, but when World War I erupted, Archie, a member of the Royal Flying Corps, was among the first to be mobilized. A sense of terrible urgency swept the couple past their hesitations and Archie and Agatha were married in December 1914. They spent most of the next four years apart.

It was during this time, while she was serving as a pharmacist (and learning about poisons!), that Agatha accepted a casual challenge from her sister to write a detective story like the ones they had always enjoyed reading together. The moment of Hercule Poirot's creation had come. Agatha wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and although it wasn't published until 1920 (it sat unnoticed for two years in the offices of the publisher), it was the beginning of her astonishing career.

With the war ended, the Christies settled into what seemed to be a satisfying life: she wrote, they traveled, he played golf (his one true passion), they had a daughter. But this life ended suddenly in 1926, when Archie informed Agatha that he was in love with another woman. It was then that Agatha vanished for ten days. After a sensational nationwide search -- by the press, the police, and a mob of overly eager amateur detectives (Dorothy Sayers among them) -- Agatha was found in a small provincial hotel registered under the name of Archie's new love. Refusing to talk about what had happened during those ten days, Agatha set the stage for almost sixty years of intense speculation about the nature of her disappearance. In this book, Janet Morgan devotes an entire chapter to the episode, laying the lingering questions finally to rest.

In the wake of her divorce from Archie, Agatha faced a slow, painful process of rebuilding her confidence and self-esteem. We see how she retreated into her writing, producing with astounding speed and seeming ease the mysteries that consistently delighted her readers, as well as the novels written under pseudonyms in which she delved into the mysteries of her own life. Eventually remarried -- to a younger man who was an esteemed archeologist -- she entered into perhaps the most happy and productive years of her life. Though she considered her writing to be secondary to the social, wifely,and motherly duties she felt required of her, she nonetheless continued her prolific outpouring of work. Her reputation and the sales of her books grew to phenomenal proportions -- at the time of her death, the figure stood at roughly four hundred million books sold worldwide.

Alongside the life, Janet Morgan explores the work itself. She examines the rich vein of fantasy that Agatha mined for her stories. She discovers in the notebooks how ideas were developed, altered, and switched from one book to another. She clarifies the reasons for the extraordinary appeal and success of Agatha Christie's work. And finally, she solves the ultimate Agatha Christie mystery: how a woman whose life was informed with a generous and gentle civility in all things could produce so large a body of work concerned almost exclusively with guilt, terror, violence and death.

ISBN-13: 9780394525549
ISBN-10: 039452554X
Publication Date: 5/12/1985
Pages: 393
Rating:

Currently 4/5 Stars.

4 stars, based on 1 rating

Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Biographies & Memoirs >> Arts & Literature >> Authors

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