Page 97: If you want to know how strongly the highbrows felt middlebrow culture was second-rate and distressingly commercial, let Virginia Woolf step forth. It was the fact that she was shamed for her illness in the nation’s newspapers in such a public way that ever since people have suspected her of duplicity and lies. Of course, she wrote great books and of course she sustained the quality of output for a lengthy career but LW gives us more - showing the determination and surprising difficulties that AC experienced. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Worsley's book excels in bringing a broader historical perspective to Christie's life and work, and her enthusiasm is infectious. lucy_worsley, a historian, documentarian + presenter, and Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces in the UK (coolest jobs ever). To me (and I am by no means an expert) a good biography is an honest and stark depiction of the subject matter.the author has a most engaging personality in her tv shows and it is also reflected in text as this is a worthwhile read. Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was ‘just’ an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Where Worsley excels is in her descriptions of Christie’s day-to-day life; we hear virtually nothing of her political opinions as she lives through two world wars, for example, but we do glean a sense of her exceptionalism in the news that she consistently ignored air-raid sirens and simply turned over in bed. A superlative biography of the Queen of Crime from one of our most noted historians, Worsley's page-turning volume emphasises not just Christie's unique gifts as a storyteller but her pioneering qualities as a determined, successful and thoroughly modern woman. You might also catch me presenting history films on the old goggle box, giving the talks on the cruise ship Queen Mary 2, or slurping cocktails.

Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern. Just a few days ago, it was the anniversary of one of the most bestselling authors of all time, Dame Agatha Christie, birthday in 1890. Lucy also doesn't shy away from addressing some of the more problematic stereotypes of people Agatha wrote about in her novels. Agatha's described "Plutocratic Period" : After the dramatic aftermath of the 1926 disappearance and her subsequent divorce. Of Christie’s first husband, Archibald, whose adultery sparked that 1926 flight, she confides that a photograph of him impressed on her “an essential fact” that she hadn’t hitherto appreciated: “He was incredibly hot.Since 2003, while working at Historic Royal Palaces, she has continued publishing historical non-fiction for adults and historical fiction for 11-14 years olds. Her characters, especially Miss Marple and Poirot, live alongside iconic detective fiction figures like Poe’s Dupin and ACD’s Sherlock Holmes. Dr Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and other historic places. There have been at least a dozen books devoted to Christie in the past two decades, and Lucy Worsley’s “Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman” is a pleasant but inessential addition to the stack. Novels are plotted across multiple volumes, apparently according to whichever one happened to be to hand.

She combines an almost militant support for her subject with a considered analysis of her books and plays. Fans will admire Worsley’s identification of real-life people, places and phrases that Christie upcycled into her fiction. C'est très frustrant, car étant donné l'épaisseur du livre je m'attendais à un travail plus fouillé et original.

Pour les fans d'Agatha Christie, la meilleur biographie est à mon sens celle écrite par Laura Thompson, beaucoup plus profonde et complète (quoique les explications sur les problèmes financiers d'A C, assez complexes et finalement peu intéressantes en soi, auraient pu être davantage résumées). In a 1971 study of English crime fiction, Colin Watson snickered that Christie “seems to have been well aware that intelligence and readership-potential are quite unrelated. Contains no book analyses — it occasionally regurgitates other people’s — and teems with misnomers, exaggerations and inaccuracies. I found her endearing, slightly problematic at moments, fascinating, relatable, and ultimately maintaining a bit of mystery still. Someone once said that the greatest character Agatha Christie ever invented was Agatha Christie herself.