Publisher Description
"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."
Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? 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?
She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful 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 realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.
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About Lucy Worsley
Lucy Worsley, PhD, is a historian, author, curator, and television presenter. She read ancient and modern history at New College, Oxford, and worked for English Heritage before becoming chief curator of historic royal palaces, based at Hampton Court. She also presents history programs for the BBC. Her bestselling books include A Very British Murder: The Curious Story of how Crime Was Turned into Art, If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home, and Courtiers: the Secret History of the Georgian Court, and Cavalier: The Story of a 17th-Century Playboy.