´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? 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.