Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley (Hodder & Stoughton, 432 pages, £25)
Rhiannon Davies: Why have you decided to write about Agatha Christie for your new book?
Lucy Worsley: I have a bit of an obsession with detective fiction, and I’m also really interested in female writers, so I thought it would be fascinating to view Agatha’s life through the eyes of a historian. And it was such a long life: she was born in 1890 and died in 1976. To me, her books aren’t just entertainment – they’re a record of the social history of the 20th century. So she’s a genius, she’s an artist, she’s a creative – but she’s also a representative woman of her time. A lot of the things that happened to other women in the 20th century happened to her.
How did her background inform her life and writing?
She was born into a family with money, and I think that’s so important in understanding a lot of the things that happened to her later. Her father was American – so that gave her an international perspective on life right from the start. One of the things people get wrong about Agatha Christie is thinking she’s quintessentially English; in reality, she was from a family of globetrotters.
They lived in Torquay, on the south coast of Devon, and Agatha had a very comfortable life in a Victorian villa. They had lots of money and a beautiful garden where, she tells us, she used to play with
