Why Agatha Christie VANISHED!
Despite being one of the most famous authors of all time, she lived a mysterious life
She is lauded as the bestselling fiction writer of all time. Her work, which includes 66 crime novels, has sold more than two billion copies and is surpassed only by sales of the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. But for a person who clearly was a genius and a pioneer, Agatha Christie was also an ordinary woman with very relatable problems, as a new book reveals.
“I’ve been a lifelong lover of her work, but as I began my research, using the family archive and reading her love letters and secret notebooks, I started to love her even more, and perhaps in a way I didn’t expect. I saw her as a human being, warts and all,” says historian Lucy Worsley, the author of the recently released Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman tells Woman’s Day.
Agatha was born in the UK in 1890 and lived through two World Wars, went through heartbreak and divorce, juggled becoming a mother and a working woman, and also had to manage the pressures of being a global celebrity, which she played down.
“The common photos of Agatha are of an old lady in a fur coat and hat who looks quite formidable,” says Lucy. “[But] she was really hot and received 10 marriage proposals! She was into skinny-dipping and
was one of the first Europeans to surf. She also liked to drive really fast.”
In fact, Agatha was a risk-taker in all areas of her life. She didn’t marry a rich man as was expected, and during World War I she worked as a nurse, which was unheard of for a woman from a wealthy family.
Despite breaking the then female mould and publishing her first novel,
The Mysterious Affair At Styles, in 1920, she would go on to spend her life pretending to be an ordinary housewife.
MISSING FORTNIGHT
Lucy puts much of this down to the huge public shaming Agatha endured in 1926, after famously disappearing for nearly two weeks after discovering her husband Archie was having an affair.
“She became part of this real-life crime drama,” says Lucy. “She went missing for 11 days. Nobody knew then – and nobody knows now – exactly where she went.”
On the day after her disappearance, Agatha’s damaged car was found several kilometres from her home, partly hidden by bushes, with headlights still on. Inside were her driving licence, fur coat and a suitcase.
It appeared the perfect set-up for a detective novel and the press speculated if Agatha was trying out a new plot or whether it was a publicity stunt. After she was discovered staying in a hotel under a different name, more than four hours’ drive away, they decided she was trying to frame her cheating husband for murder.
This false narrative painted Agatha as a “bad woman who had done bad things”.
But Lucy’s research shows the reality was less dramatic.
“She was under enormous pressure to write another bestseller at the same time as her mother died and her husband left her for a younger woman.”
In a frenzied state after arguing with Archie, Agatha had driven throughout the night away from home. She then made a half-hearted suicide attempt, steering her car away from the road and bumping her head as it crashed.
Lucy says what happened until Agatha was found over a week later was most likely a period of deep depression with the possible addition of a dissociative fugue state or temporary memory loss.
This memory loss was how Agatha tried to explain the incident, but it was questioned from the start and, writes Lucy, this public questioning and shaming of her illness was the “great injustice” of the writer’s life.
Despite this, Agatha continued to write bestselling plays and novels, many featuring her beloved characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, until her death at 85, in 1976.
“Her books work on different levels,” Lucy says, explaining their popularity. “She champions the underdog. Poirot is an outsider, a war refugee who didn’t attend private school but he shouldn’t be underestimated. The same is true of Miss Marple.”
Nor should their creator be underestimated.
“Agatha was tame and well-behaved on the outside but wild within,” says Lucy.