Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time. Having been a reader of Agatha Christie books for 50 years this book by Lucy Worsley was a must read for me. With great affection, Worsley masterfully maneuvers her way through Christie’s life and prolific oeuvre. Agatha Christie fans intrigued to learn where the queen of crime gained her real-life inspiration will enjoy Lucy Worsley's new biography. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

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? Throughout her life, Agatha would be emancipated from worrying about her weight or fretting about it. And as much as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s ingenuity relies on the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in common with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.

Having said that, I was interested in the author's life and her family and the book does give a good account of her life. The author has a lovely way to her writing that is soft and engaging so a reader feels as though they are part of a conversation. Her publishers found her a formidable client, so there was definitely ambition there even if she wouldn't admit to it.

In the film Agatha the eponymous heroine did not try to murder Nancy Neele — she meant to commit suicide and make it look it was Nancy Neele who killed her, thus causing her to hang for it. I listened to the audiobook, also narrated by Lucy Worsley, and couldn't have been happier with my choice.It all feels a bit try-hard as if trying to separate this from more sober biographies or assessments of Christie. Worsley offers close readings of Christie’s work and presents a careful reframe of the novelist’s famous 1926 disappearance. This is a well-written biography that takes the bad (racism, anti-semitism) with the good (Christie as an unappreciated author and dramatist). An irreverent historian, she sets in context the events of her subject's life with great skill, then shows how Christie reflected them in her work. Having read her books on Austen and Queen Victoria I knew this would be a well written, interesting, often lighthearted look at the life of an extraordinary woman.

Page 352: Eventually Rosalind decided a controlled glimpse of her mother’s archive might help reshape the narrative. lucy_worsley, a historian, documentarian + presenter, and Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces in the UK (coolest jobs ever).She was willing to pretend that she was a regular citizen, not a celebrated author, a ridiculous proposition. I treated myself and listened to the wonderful Lucy read her own work and who better to present her findings. An introvert who was uncomfortable with the spotlight, she was also reluctant naming herself as an author, no doubt due to her Victorian upbringing, when women of her station were not supposed to work for a living. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Its exuberance captures the joyful, lively Agatha who hid her joyful liveliness from people she didn’t know well. Her characters, especially Miss Marple and Poirot, live alongside iconic detective fiction figures like Poe’s Dupin and ACD’s Sherlock Holmes.

But as for reading about her life, Christie’s own fascinating Autobiography is the most interesting book by far. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction.