Contemporary Literary Criticism | Christie, Agatha (Vol. 12) - Naomi Bliven

NAOMI BLIVEN

"An Autobiography," by Agatha Christie … is the work of a writer who depended upon a skeleton—the formal structure of the detective story—in order to allow herself to imagine in public. These memoirs are like nothing else she wrote: they are vivid, stylish, subtle, relaxed, and wholly uncarpentered…. [Mrs. Christie's] tone provides a sense of freshness, of discovery, as if she were inviting us along as she finds out how she came to be who she was. She also demonstrates, by the way, how intense and complex emotions take shape in narrow little societies. Sometimes she justifies the past in ways we cannot accept. For instance, she thinks that late-Victorian parents, like her own, were "realistic" in labelling their children early, and tells us, with no apparent resentment, "I myself was always recognized, though quite kindly, as 'the slow one' of the family." This judgment was nonsense, and I think it harmed her, deepening her shyness, her sense of...

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