Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Agatha Christie
-
Standard Name: Christie, Agatha
Birth Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
Married Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
Married Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan
Titled: Lady Mallowan
Pseudonym: Mary Westmacott
Pseudonym: Mac Miller
Pseudonym: Nathaniel Miller
Pseudonym: Mostyn Grey
Pseudonym: Martin West
Used Form: Agatha Christie Mallowan
AC
, the Duchess of Death, produced eighty books, including sixty-six novels and detective fictions, and fourteen of short stories as well as poetry and suspense drama. At the height of her career she published two or three books a year; they have been sold and translated in more than a hundred countries, with sale reaching a billion in the original English and another billion in translation.
Lanchester, John. “The Case of Agatha Christie”. London Review of Books, Vol.
40
, No. 24, pp. 3-8.
3
Her work is identified with meticulously constructed plots and ingenious misdirection. UNESCO
reported in August 1961 that she was the world's best-selling author writing in English.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
13
Morgan, Janet. Agatha Christie: A Biography. Collins, http://Rutherford HSS.
216, 326
Her famous sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, hide their amazing ability beneath an unimpressive exterior.
LP
's revised adaptation of Agatha Christie
's Philomel Cottage opened at Sonning near Reading, with the title changed from that of Christie's original to that of its previous screen adaptations: Love from a Stranger.
“Louise Page (1955 - )”. doollee.com: The Playwrights Database.
Performance of text
Louise Page
LP
's Agatha Christie
adaptation, then entitled Philomel Cottage (from a Christie short story of 1924 with the same title), first opened in 2004 at Leeds.
“The Fellowship Scheme. Current Fellows. Louise Page”. The Royal Literary Fund.
Author summary
Patricia Wentworth
PW
began her writing career early in the twentieth century with half a dozen historical novels and romances and went on to achieve great popularity with between sixty and seventy thrillers, mysteries, and detective novels...
Publishing
Dorothy L. Sayers
Reviews which DLS
wrote for the Sunday Times during the 1930s allowed her to comment on most of her fellow crime-writers, notably Margery Allingham
and Agatha Christie
. She provided introductions for volumes of short...
Publishing
Ngaio Marsh
With this book she moved from Geoffrey Bles, who had published her first seven novels, to Collins
. She felt guilty about this move, but she joined a stable including Agatha Christie
, and...
Reception
Margery Allingham
Early critics of MA
's work saw her as a young revitaliser of the detective form, along with Nicholas Blake
and Michael Innes. Later she was linked with the slightly older Dorothy Sayers
and...
Reception
Antonia Fraser
Interviewed about this play, AF
said: I don't think I could write the way I do without Agatha Christie
or Patricia Highsmith
.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(9 November 1985): 20
Reception
Susan Hill
The play's initial success may have been helped by the tradition of spooky shows for Christmas; its durability, however, defies explanation. In December 2018 it had celebrated thirty years, and was still running at the...
Reception
Margery Allingham
This honour was one she shared with Agatha Christie
and Ngaio Marsh
. Penguin sold nearly a million copies of this edition, to add to the half million of her titles they had sold already...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bentley
PB
's protagonist is an amateur detective, as was standard for the genre at this date. She follows by twenty years on Agatha Christie
's Miss Marple (born in 1930) and precedes by the...
Textual Features
Antonia Fraser
In her detective-story guise, Fraser sees herself as part of a women's tradition in the genre, and names as influences a number of writers who are known for interest in human psychology and a high...
Textual Features
Antonia Fraser
The Dictionary of Literary Biography calls Jemima Shore a new kind of woman detective.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
276
Her independence, intelligence, and literary sensibility are nothing new, but her rejection of marriage and her cheerful sexual promiscuity are...
Textual Features
P. D. James
The result, as Ashby noted, falls somewhere between the cosy settings of Agatha Christie
's Miss Marples novels and the gritty urban dystopias of contemporaries like Ruth Rendell
. PDJ
's imagined worlds tend to...
Textual Features
Patricia Wentworth
Though the Feminist Companion says that Miss Silver is a character [i]n the mould of Agatha Christie
's Miss Marple, she actually predates Miss Marple by two years. She is a former governess who now...
Textual Features
Joan Aiken
JA
also published a number of adult thrillers, romantic novels, and hybrids between these two genres. For these, as for her children's fiction, she favours settings in time or place which are either exotic or...
