Book info

• Title Agatha Christie
• Author Lucy Worsley
• Year 2022
• Genre Biography

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? 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? She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. 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.

Thoughts

I love Lucy Worsley’s informative but relaxed style and so was interested to listen to the audiobook of this, her biography of the most infamous of female detective writers. It was great - absolutely fascinating, well researched, a balanced view that was favourable towards the author but with plenty of caveats along the way. It made me want to read Christie’s works, of which I have only enjoyed a few. Really well done and well read.

Rating: 5 / 5