Lucy Worsley

This notion that writing was just one of a string of hobbies or accomplishments was more widespread than you might think. Madge sent her stories to Vanity Fair for pin money. Agatha’s grandmother Polly, skilled at embroidery, used her needle to support her family. In each case, what was considered a harmless pastime led to cash. Nothing could be further from the Romantic idea of the artist: a starving, struggling figure in his garret, hurling his genius at his lonely task. But then female writers have always fitted their work in around the edges of ordinary life. ‘How much more interesting it would be if I could say that I always longed to be a writer,’ Agatha confessed, later, but ‘such an idea never came into my head.’

Ethel was working full-time in a mill at thirteen; she had her first poem published in the Blackburn Times at eighteen. ‘We think we have found a new singer,’ wrote a critic, ‘what might such a singer accomplish if she had more leisure than hard factory work affords?’9 In 1913 Ethel went on to write a novel, Miss Nobody, thought to be the first published in Britain by a working-class woman. Had Agatha likewise needed to earn a living, she may well have remained a Miss Nobody too.

history’s most-performed female playwright.

These days we don’t need to put women on pedestals.

And that means we have to face the fact that somewhere in the mass of contradictions making up Agatha Christie was a very dark heart. It’s not just that she could dream up stories in which even children can kill. It’s also that her work contains views on race and class that are unacceptable today.

Agatha Christie’s writing has become a sort of shorthand for a typically English view of the world.

The prejudices of her class and time, often revealed in her fiction, are part of the history of twentieth-century Britain.

The idea that a house, a person even, could suddenly flip from familiar and friendly to evil and wicked was all too familiar to Agatha, for it emerges in her childhood nightmare of the Gunman or Gun Man.