Young Agatha Christie

Product Information

Christie’s mind began to protect itself from further pain by inventing a new identity. “I had now become in my mind Mrs Teresa Neele of South Africa,” she says. Someone who had the same surname as Archie’s lover, someone who came from a place where she and Archie had been happy. “You can’t write your fate,” Christie would say, years later, but “you can do what you like with the characters you create”. So she created a new character for herself, a character as which she could do what she wanted. What she wanted most of all was to escape from the unbearable life of Mrs Christie. Prichard, Mathew (2012). The Grand Tour: Around The World With The Queen Of Mystery. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-219122-9. If the women on the train had asked her profession, she’d have said she had none. When an official form required her to put down what she did, the woman who is estimated to have sold 2bn copies always wrote “housewife”. Despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker. She sidestepped a world that tried to define her. Curran, John (2011). Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0062065445.

BBC Radio 4 Extra – Miss Marple – Episode guide". BBC. Archived from the original on 9 March 2021 . Retrieved 5 May 2020. It is absolutely untrue to suggest that there was anything in the nature of a row or a tiff between my wife and myself on Friday morning … I strongly depreciate introducing any tittle-tattle into this matter … ”Christie’s “disappearance” had the impact it did because of the 1920s context that saw a new kind of media celebrity being created. She wasn’t alone in becoming an author-as-celebrity. It may have been accidental, and deeply unpleasant, but it would also become a central plank of her massive success. For a long time, people investigating Christie’s disappearance have tended towards one of two positions. One is that, in the days after the crash, she was experiencing the specific condition of dissociative fugue – a state brought on by trauma and stress, in which you literally forget who you are. The alternative position is that she was faking it, even trying to frame Archie for killing her. Only one thing can be said for certain: on Saturday 4 December 1926, and for some days thereafter, Christie experienced a distressing episode of mental illness, brought on by the trauma of the death of her mother and the breakdown of her marriage. She lost her way of life and her sense of self. Christie reported that on the Saturday morning, while police were investigating her abandoned car, she had ‘lost her memory’ Robyns, Gwen (1978). The Mystery of Agatha Christie. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc. p.13. ISBN 0-385-12623-9.

Gross, John (2006). The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes. Oxford University Press. p. 267. ISBN 978-0199543410.Christie's obituary in The Times notes that "she never cared much for the cinema, or for wireless and television." Further, a b c d e Gillian, Gill (1990). Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. New York City: The Free Press. ISBN 002911702X. Life and career [ edit ] Childhood and adolescence: 1890–1907 [ edit ] Portrait of Christie entitled Lost in Reverie, by Douglas John Connah, 1894 In 2015, marking the 125th anniversary of her birth date, 25 contemporary mystery writers and one publisher gave their views on Christie's works. Many of the authors had read Christie's novels first, before other mystery writers, in English or in their native language, influencing their own writing, and nearly all still viewed her as the "Queen of Crime" and creator of the plot twists used by mystery authors. Nearly all had one or more favourites among Christie's mysteries and found her books still good to read nearly 100 years after her first novel was published. Just one of the 25 authors held with Wilson's views. [163] Book sales [ edit ]