Lucy Worsley

This is a beautiful biography of Jane Austen. I have read several, but I love this one.
I thought I knew what there was to know about Jane Austen's life. As far as I could tell, details were a bit on the sparse side. Many of her letters were destroyed; there are no satisfactory pictures of her (just a sketch or two), and her family filtered her legacy in the decades following her death.

But there is so much in this book! The author has pulled references from letters of all of Jane's friends show more and family, chance remarks of acquaintances, and contemporary accounts of places and things that Jane would have been familiar with. The result is an extremely satisfying and fairly thorough biography. As the title suggests, it is written in the context of all the places Jane Austen spent time. This is a fascinating new take that allows for freedom of exploration of Jane's world.

Lucy Worsley writes in a spirit of great appreciation for the genius and personality of Jane. One can tell she is intrigued and inspired by the connections she is making and the conclusions she is drawing. Jane Austen could never be entirely known as a person at this remove of over 200 years, but this biography takes a darn good shot at it. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Lucy Worsley is a treat: a historian who gets across actual bits of history whilst being damned entertaining. This is a tour through British history from the 1700s to the mid-1900s that dually talks about how the populace processed actual murder and how it became entertainment, the actual press reports and the fictional variant. Detective fiction arose out of this, and she spends a lot of time on that. Holmes is a big bit, so is Christie, but she brings in lots of less-read and forgotten show more detective fiction writers. Even Morse gets a passing mention (p. 160). All-in-all, an enjoyable and intellectual romp through our fascination with murder. show less

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 show more 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. show less