A wonderful effort combing through all the research materials and paint a detailed alive adventure of Agatha Christie's life. ( )

If I had listened to it, I probably would have given more stars because I love Lucy Worsley and that energy would have made a better impact than my I’m-sick-and-in-bed lethargy. But my overall impression really comes from all the times she mentioned or quoted from Agatha’s autobiography - it made me feel that I should have read that instead…. ( )

Having read a couple of Agatha Christie novels, I was intrigued enough to buy a Copy of [b:Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman|59822447|Agatha Christie A Very Elusive Woman|Lucy Worsley|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1640614383l/59822447._SY75_.jpg|94222915]and tbh it really didn't float my boat. I felt like I needed to be a fan of Christie in order to get something from this book. The author references a lot of characters and plot lines from Christie’s novels which if you haven't read a great deal of her work may make for tedious reading. Perhaps a reader who is more familiar with her work may well get more from this book than me.

Having said that, I was interested in the author's life and her family and the book does give a good account of her life.

I think this would made a good read if you are better acquainted with her work than I was.

An ok read for me just not one for my favourites shelf. ( )

An informative and interesting biography of the author convincingly showing how much she was a victim of not only misogyny but also intellectual snobbery and how progressive many of her works were when looked at in the cultural climate they were written in. ( )

I’m not particularly an Agatha Christie fan, but I thought this biography looked interesting. I imagine if a reader has read a lot of Christie’s catalogue, the incredible research and titled cross referencing would make the book mean more. I can’t remember the last Christie book I read or even which title, but the biography nonetheless was very information and enjoyable to read. Worseley went to a lot of trouble devoting who knows how much time to achieve this thoroughness. I’m sure the book will stand as one of the most important of the many Christie biographies written. I recommend it to fans and non-fans alike. ( )

A highly enjoyable read, it gave enough details to bring Christie to life for me but didn't fall into the "and then the next day" trap. Worsely focuses on particular moments more than others that seem to tease out more of who Christie was and the forces that shaped her. I knew the rough picture of her life and have seen and heard Worsley doing the book circuit but there was plenty that was new and interesting. I was fascinated by her somewhat confusing extended family and how she welcomes those not directly related to her into it. She seems to have a been a mostly quiet private person and I am impressed that Worsley was able to tease out little facts that explain her better. After reading a less than enjoyable fiction by Worsley, perhaps I need to delve more into her history.

I picked this up for research, and soon after I acquired it, I was delighted to come across Worsley's series on PBS that brings vivid life to the book! That encouraged me to start reading all the sooner. While I've watched a number of Worseley's programs, I hadn't read her work before. I found her to be an incredibly breezy, fascinating read. She incorporates many details but never bogs down the narrative. Every so often, her own voice emerges with an aside as well. Agatha Christie had an interesting life, and is a figure greatly misunderstood. I really appreciated the author's incites into the period during which Christie went missing in 1926. ( )

Lucy Worsley's biography of Agatha Christie is a fantastic read. Worsley delves into the life of this very private author with respect but without rose-coloured glasses. She provides great context for the life of a woman who was born into privilege in the late Victorian-era and lived through two marriages, two wars, and significant social upheaval. Worsley is a sympathetic biographer, particularly in the section about Agatha Christie's infamous disappearance in 1926, but never glosses over some of the more problematic aspects of Agatha Christie and her writing (particularly her anti-Semitism). I particularly enjoyed that Worsley is a presence in the biography and occasionally her first person perspective on events is included (I laughed aloud at one particular comment about a photograph of Agatha Christie's first husband), a vivid reminder that biographies are not impartial but are shaped by their authors' own views and prejudices. Highly recommended both for Agatha Christie fans and for readers who enjoy a good biography. ( )

Lucy Worsley brings together Christie's books and her life to show us how life has informed her writing quite successfully although there are a couple of places where I didn't think the book was quite so successful.

What Worsley does do well is describe Christie's home life, her love of houses - at one point she had eight - and running a household, her dismissing of her writing as something she did second to being a wife and having a life and her absolute commitment to her second husband, Max. I also enjoyed her identification of 'Christie's tricks' of writing in what is an impressive range of books and plays. Some of these are about hiding important objects in plain sight, having a hidden couple who are usually having an affair, playing with appearances and involving real life crimes and other newsworthy items in the plot. These are all linked to particular books and to events or ideas in her life.

Of course, Christie's missing 11 days are written about with Worsley unpicking the evidence and identifying the lies, suggesting that mental illness, a dissasociative fugue state, brought about by stress, in particular the breakdown of her first marriage, as an explanation. She also identifies other moments of depression in a life that was not without its difficulties.

What there was less of was how Christie created her stories, the process she went through. It is clear that she wrote often, sometimes in bursts, when she was travelling with her husband and she must have done this regularly because she was prolific but as to how she dreamed up her stories we are left none the wiser. At the end it is explained that her notebooks are almost impossible to follow, having been written out of sequence and sometimes only being a series of jottings but I was left quite frustrated by this. The whole point of this book is to say that Christie is the Queen of mystery writing but we are not let into the hallowed halls to find out more about her processes.

It is a very readable book for fans of Christie written by a fan of Christie. ( )

Great biography of Agatha Christie. It goes into the belief that Agatha did have a breakdown when she disappeared. It covered a lot of things I did not know. I enjoyed Lucy Wolsey's narration. ( )

Having read most of the Agatha Christie mysteries I was looking forward to learning more about the actual author of those enjoyable books. It was a definite added bonus that I found a book written by the great Lucy Worsley, who is one of my favorite history presenters on PBS/BBC. This audio book, read by the author, did not disappoint. ( )

My opinion and knowledge of Agatha Christie and her work would fix me firmly in the final chapters of Lucy Worsley's biography, because I judge her books through the television adaptations of the 1980s and 1990s. Does that mean that I'm missing what makes her detective novels so clever and enduring? Probably. I tried to start the Read Christie challenge 2023, but only got through Sad Cypress before recalling why her 'tirribly tirribly' middle class mysteries haven't aged well in my eyes.

However, I do enjoy a good biography and Lucy Worsley has a knack of bringing the past to life, and I find now that I like and understand the author better than her impressive back catalogue. Agatha sounds like my kind of woman, except that she was born into a privileged life and maintained her middle class outlook for the whole of her career. Naturally shy and awkward, my favourite Christie quotes include: 'Inarticulate I shall always be,’ she explains, ‘it is one of the causes that have made me a writer' and ‘the reason I began to write . . . was in order to avoid having to talk to people.' Yes, queen. I also felt sorry for her daughter Rosalind too, forever trapped in the cool shade of her mother's famous persona : 'She herself described her chief characteristic as ‘criticising others’ and when asked who she’d rather be if not herself, she answered ‘I don’t care.’

There isn't a lot to Agatha's story, apart from the famous 'disappearance' of 1926, when her mother's death and her husband's decision to announce he was leaving her for his younger lover sent the writer over the edge. In the author's words, 'Agatha’s daily life may also read as small beer, full of everyday doings and happenings'. She was born into a well-off upper middle class family in a large Victorian mansion in Devon at the end of the nineteenth century. Her father died when she was young and the family's financial security went into decline (although they never lost the house). Agatha met her first husband, Archie Christie, before the start of the First World War and married him in haste. She worked as a VAD and in a hospital dispensary during the war, where she first had the idea of writing a detective story. She had her only child, Rosalind, in 1919 and wasn't the most maternal woman for that time - she left her newborn baby in Devon with her mother and a nurse, and went back to London with Archie! In the 1920s, she had a breakdown and disappeared to Harrogate. In the 1930s, she was divorced, went travelling and met her second husband, the oily amateur archaeologist who used her money to fund his pillaging in Iraq and wrote creepy letters to her daughter. They stayed together until her death, but ew, no. The book also covers her life and career through the Second World War, when she wrote many of her most successful stories, and into the 50s, when her plays were as celebrated as her books, and her gradual decline in the 1960s and 70s, when she became more of a 'brand', selling poorer stories on the pull of her name.

I was interested to learn that Agatha was pulled up in America for her anti-Semitism long before cancel culture was a thing: 'Eventually the matter was taken up by the Council Against Intolerance in America, who asked Agatha’s publishers to eliminate the anti-Semitism from all new editions of Agatha’s books'. Her racial slurs were quietly omitted while her attitudes to 'foreigners' and sexuality are viewed as 'artefact(s) of the writer's class and time.' Neither was I aware that the plot of The Mirror Crack'd was painfully similar to the real life tragedy of Gene Tierney's daughter Daria, who contracted measles through her mother, which Agatha denied being aware of. Obviously the tightly plotted mysteries, which I never try to unravel ahead of the characters, and the nostalgia are what keep her novels in print, but like Jane Austen and other dead authors with a 'Society' to their name, criticism is not accepted.

An accessible and well researched biography, written by an obvious fan of Agatha Christie, delivered in Lucy Worsley's inimitable style. I'm still not tempted to read any more dated detective novels, however. ( )

A fascinating, breezy biography of the world's greatest mystery novelist.

Lucy Worsley always has an engaging style, and she brings a refreshing level of humanity to her description of Agatha Christie.

The legendary 11 days' disappearance therefore gets a level-headed and fair treatment here, instead of viewing it as one of Christie's own fictional plots to be figured out and ghoulishly salivated over. There's an appropriate amount of respect paid to issues of mental health.

There's not necessarily much new material unearthed in this biography, but it is nonetheless a fresh and modern take on this beloved writer. I'm really looking forward to the TV program that will (I hope) accompany this bio!! I've already enjoyed the podcasts Lucy Worsley has been on in connection with this book. ( )

This is a very comprehensive biography of Agatha Christie (three sets of photos!) and one I heartily recommend for fans. If you haven’t read any of Agatha’s work, I would recommend reading at least The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the stage version of And Then There Were None, The Hollow, and Endless Night before you begin—there are spoilers! ( )

An impressive non-fiction work that covers Agatha Christie's whole life, written by a person who is quite obviously a "fan", well versed in the events of Christie's life and the books she has written.

I've also just watched, and can recommend, the first of the documentaries (4?) based on the book.

I was glad to see that Worsley shares some of my own impressions of the importance of Agatha Christie in crime fiction. She refers to some of Christie's plot strategies as Christie's "tricks" and refers to the way they made a difference to what we expect from crime fiction as a genre. The book has also sowed a few seeds that will influence my interpretation of the Christie novels that I intend reading this year. ( )

I loved learning about Agatha Christie in this marvelous read; somehow I didn’t realize until recently that Lucy Worsley wrote books as I’d only seen her on PBS specials, but I loved her voice both literally in the audiobook as well as figuratively in how she crafted Agatha’s story. Christie truly experienced such an amazing portion of the twentieth century, and there was just so much here to discover; Worsley also does a fantastic job blending tales of her life with those of her novels. I think a great biography for me is when I get teary at the subject’s death as they’ve become so familiar to me, and I had that here. ( )

This is out of the gate the best Christie biography I’ve read, and probably one of the best biographies in general. The main reason being that it treats its subject as a person not just as the sum of their achievements.

Worsley presents a well-rounded, honest evaluation of Christie first and foremost as a woman working her way through a complicated life not always in tune with the cultural or societal changes around her. A woman who was remarkable in many ways, yet sorely lacking in others, who produced a body of work that took on a life of its own beyond her control and understanding.

You don’t need an in-depth knowledge of the Christie bibliography as the text does an excellent job of aligning aspects of her work with the influences and impact of the different stages of her life as she reinvented both herself and her fiction.

For me one quote really highlights just how Christie was in many ways unaware of her own achievements, when asked how she’d like to be remembered she answered “as a rather good writer of detective stories.” ( )

And excellent and readable addition to the Agatha Christie biography genre. A reassessment of a writer discounted as a populist, fabulist and as a difficult woman. Worsley reexamines the facts of Agatha's life, and sees her as a complex woman, a woman of her time and a great woman writer. I was delighted to see her recognise how the history of the early 20th century can be read through Christie's novels. Highly recommended. ( )