lou's library

Agatha Christie is one of those authors I keep returning to. For one thing, that woman has written more books than I can ever hope to read. For another, the vast majority of her books that I have read have been genius and just such fun. But with every Christie novel I had read, my curiosity about its author grew. And then I learned that Lucy Worsley, author of Jane Austen At Home, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed earlier this year, had written an Agatha Christie biography. So of course I had to get my hands on that as soon as possible. Here are my thoughts.

Agatha Christie – A Very Elusive Woman is an entertaining and balanced account of the life of one of the most successful authors of all time. It’s actually mind-boggling how many copies Agatha Christie has sold and continues to sell and I’ve always been intrigued to know what sort of woman could accomplish this at a time when most women were still expected to be housewives and nothing more. Lucy Worsley is incredibly skilled at writing a fair account of a much-loved person, without making them out to be a god, and not afraid to point out their flaws.

I value that in a biographer and cannot wait to see who Lucy Worsley will write about next! Her writing is witty and entertaining and yet does not shy away from heavy topics, such as Agatha Christie’s lifelong antisemitism. I was quite surprised to learn about her strong dislike of Jews and it added another layer to the person Lucy Worsley was doing her best to illuminate.

That this is no easy feat is already made clear in the title of the book – the ‘a very elusive woman’ indicates that Agatha Christie does not make it easy for anyone trying to decode her. She was treated unfairly by the press during her lifetime and was very selective about what she talked about publicly (which is more than fair enough in my opinion). That results in some gaps when you’re trying to paint a picture of the author. So even though I have now read an entire biography about Agatha Christie, I’m not sure I could tell you what she was like.

I want to make it clear that this is no fault of Lucy Worsley, I think she did an amazing job at attempting to bring Agatha Christie to life. Christie just seems incredibly reluctant to let herself be the topic of any discussion. I mean the woman disappeared for days in 1926 and to this day it is not clear what happened! No wonder there are gaps in our understanding of her.

What I appreciated a lot about the biography is its clear positioning of Agatha Christie as a crucial figure in setting the scene for other female writers and for her achievements towards feminism:

Her achievements in her own later life would put an indisputably older woman at the heart of popular culture. (p. 264)

Although, again, Lucy Worsley does not hesitate to point out that Agatha Christie would never have called herself a feminist, was not a political person at all and held rather conservative views. Still, the very fact of her existence in the public eye as an extremely successful female author made it slightly easier for the women who came after her. And that should be applauded.

There is something appealing about Agatha Christie’s character refusing to be cast into a single category. She’s simply more complex than that, although for a modern reader, some of her views might be hard to understand. It seems fitting for such an outstanding writer of detective fiction to leave several questions unanswered.

I also loved how Lucy Worsley did not pretend that every single book by Agatha Christie was a masterpiece, or even good. She held no reservations about admitting that some of her books simply were bad. Lucy Worsley does not put Agatha Christie on a pedestal and to me, that was refreshing in a biography.

I would highly recommend this biography to anyone eager to learn a bit more about Agatha Christie, or even about the Britain of the past century. During her lifetime, two world wars took place, the British Empire crumbled, the world she had been born into changed drastically and she was there to witness it all and let it influence her writing. This is, to some extent, also a book about Britain. And Lucy Worsley manages to bring these topics to life, so they don’t feel like a history lesson for even a single page.

I hope you enjoyed this review, let me know if you have ever read anything by Agatha Christie! If you want more recommendations, I have a blog post about the best non-fiction books and one about classics for beginners. Happy reading!