An Elusive Woman: Lucy Worsley on Agatha Christie

The historian and broadcaster sat down with our editor to talk about Christie, her life and the many screen adaptations.

Lucy Worsley

Lucy, many congratulations on the new book. The subtitle is An Elusive Woman, her reported words in an interview in December 1926. Was this a difficult project to embark on, and how do you feel about Christie now you’ve finished?

I liked Christie before I began, but now I love her. That’s warts and all, light and shade! I was worried at first that she would be too successful, too famous, too magnificent, for my readers to really warm to her. There’s something a bit prickly and difficult about her public image. But the woman and her image are totally different things. I discovered so many fragilities and vulnerabilities that I ended up feeling almost protective of her. She would in later life present herself as ‘the Duchess of Death,’ this powerful, enigmatic figure who rarely gave interviews. But that was a way of armouring herself, I believe. It was self-protection. I knew right from the start that I wanted to intertwine her life story with a broader story about the twentieth century. I think her defining feature was her modernity, whether that’s big things like being a working mother, exploring psychotherapy, living through two World Wars, being divorced – or little ones, like her passion for speed. In the 1920s, she learned how to surf in Hawaii, and in the 1960s she would drive her car at its maximum velocity of 85 miles an hour down the new M4 motorway. For a girl born in the reign of Queen Victoria, she broke all sorts of rules.