![]() When her father died, the bond between Agatha and Clara only grew stronger. She was the third child of Frederick and Clara Miller, an afterthought, who was not allowed to go to school like her older brother and sister, but stayed home with her loving but possessive mother. She was, as she said herself, ‘a lovely girl’. I find biography a fascinating genre, but I think it’s devilishly hard to write.Īgatha Christie grew up strong, beautiful, talented and cherished. ![]() There is much less quotation from archive materials, which makes for a lighter, freer read, but at the same time you feel that a great deal of information may in fact be speculation. ![]() But it also came with some more dubious strategies, such as taking the novels Christie wrote under her pseudonym of Mary Westmacott as straightforward evidence of what she felt and thought about her early life and first marriage. This I loved, and it gave me a much better sense of Agatha Christie as a person. ![]() Chapters look at different aspects of her existence – motherhood, the reception of her books, her time spent on archaeological digs, as they become relevant along a chronological time line. Laura Thompson’s biography of Agatha Christie sidesteps this tendency neatly, by taking a far more narrative line through her life. ![]() I confess I am not a fan of the middle section of most orthodox biographies, when the subject is being busy and productive and the biographer feels obliged to detail every lunch they attended, every trip they took. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |