Abstract
Readers have long wondered whether Agatha Christie’s keen-eyed, amateur spinster detective Miss Jane Marple was based, at least in part, upon Jane Austen. This chapter explores the common ground between Christie’s sleuth and Austen through consideration of Christie’s reading tastes, reading practices, and book ownership, as evident in both published and archival sources, as well as her claims to be a lover of Austen’s writings. I further examine questions of feminine professionalism, expertise, and genius, as present in Christie’s discussions of her own authorship, in her portrayal of Miss Marple, and in Austen biography and myths. In addition to illuminating the Christie/Austen connection, I aim to offer a model of how Austen scholars might productively pursue other apparently slender threads connecting Austen’s successor authors to her, especially those links that cross the canonical divide between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ fiction.
I am grateful to Lisa Hopkins for the invitation to write this essay; to the Christie Archive Trust for permission to quote archival sources and to archivist Joe Keogh for generously providing context for those sources; to Rodney Yoder for sharing his knowledge of Christie’s career; and to Karla Yoder for assiduously collecting Christie novels in Botswana in the 1980s.
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Notes
- 1.
Christopher Brooke, Jane Austen: Illusion and Reality (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 136.
- 2.
Elizabeth Jean Sabiston, Private Sphere to World Stage from Austen to Eliot (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 48, n. 67. Such passing comments on the two Janes join other by-the-by observations regarding techniques common to Austen and Christie, such as Richard Jenkyns’ comparison of what he calls the ‘theatrical set-piece’ in Pride and Prejudice with Christie’s Poirot novels. Richard Jenkyns, A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46.
- 3.
John Curran, Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Her Notebooks (New York: Harper, 2011), 69.
- 4.
On Chapman’s role in editing and promoting Austen, see Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). On turn-of-the-twentieth-century Janeitism generally, see Devoney Looser, The Making of Jane Austen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
- 5.
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: Harper, 2011), 433; subsequently quoted parenthetically in text. Christie composed her autobiography intermittently, via dictation, from 1950 to 1965; it was published posthumously in 1977. Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson, describes the compositional process of the Autobiography in his introduction to the 2010 republished edition, which includes a CD containing excerpts of the original dictation. In her retrospective account of her life, Christie unapologetically dwells on enjoyable recollections and skirts painful ones: notoriously, she omits entirely her nationally known disappearance in 1926 during the breakdown of her first marriage.
- 6.
Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1987), 176. Morgan was, in her words, given ‘complete freedom’ by Christie’s daughter, Rosalind Hicks, to consult and quote from unpublished letters and other personal documents (ix).
- 7.
Merja Makinen has astutely pointed out the propensity of literary scholars writing on Christie to ‘work off their own bat and … not [to] engage in any real sense in the critical debate.’ Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 24. See too Susan Rowland’s contention, in reference to Christie and other women authors of detective fiction, that ‘[p]erhaps there has been an inverse relationship between their enormous popularity and serious critical attention.’ Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), viii.
- 8.
On Christie and women detective writers, see in particular Makinen, Investigating Femininity, and Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. The first chapter of Makinen’s Investigating Femininity provides an overview of prior fan and scholarly writing about Christie, including treatments of her mysteries in the general context of detective fiction; notable in particular is Mary Evans, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World (London: Continuum, 2009).
- 9.
Glenwood Irons and Joan Warthling Roberts, ‘From Spinster to Hipster: The “Suitability” of Miss Marple and Anna Lee’, in Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, ed. Irons, 64–73 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995); Kathy Mezei, ‘Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech: The Case of Miss Marple, Miss Mole, and Miss Jekyll’, Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (2007): 103–20; Jilly Lippman, ‘Mother of Invention: Agatha Christie, the Middlebrow Detective Novel and Kerry Greenwood’s Postcolonial Tribute Series’, in J. C. Bernthal, ed., The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy, 145–60 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016).
- 10.
Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple (London: Routledge, 1991), ii.
- 11.
Anne Hart, The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1985). On this book’s popularity, see Makinen, Investigating Femininity, 9–10.
- 12.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991); Merja Makinen, ‘Agatha Christie in Dialogue with To the Lighthouse: The Modernist Artist’, in Bernthal, ed., Ageless Agatha Christie, 11–28.
- 13.
Bernthal, ed., Ageless Agatha Christie; J. C. Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 14.
Gill approaches Christie as a ‘committed writer and a dedicated professional’ who was a ‘stellar example of the “anxiety of authorship” that afflicts all women writers to some degree.’ Gillian Gill, Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries (New York: Free Press, 1990), xi. Makinen’s forthcoming biography, Agatha Christie: Life and Letters, promises to add a welcome twenty-first-century treatment.
- 15.
This description of Christie, which appears in the 2012 reissue of her novels by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins in the US, notes too that her ‘books have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion in a hundred foreign languages.’ Agatha Christie, Postern of Fate (1973; New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2012), i.
- 16.
‘Confessions Album’, 15 October 1897 entries, courtesy of the Christie Archive Trust.
- 17.
‘Confessions Album’, 27 October 1903 entries.
- 18.
‘Confessions Album’, 19 April 1954 entries.
- 19.
Curran, Murder in the Making, 408. Curran cautions that ‘it is difficult to tell what these lists represent. They may be titles to be read, to recommend, or even to give as presents. I opt for the first possibility; the consistent dates seem to indicate that the lists were drawn from publishers’ catalogues of forthcoming titles.’
- 20.
Agatha Christie, reading list prepared for Mathew Prichard, n.d., courtesy of the Christie Archive Trust.
- 21.
Archivist Joe Keogh explains that ‘Greenway contains nearly everything that was left to AC’s daughter Rosalind who in turn gave Greenway to the National Trust, bar some items that were auctioned or left in trust to our archive.’ Email to author, 13 December 2016. According to John Tucker, the local and family history librarian at Torquay Library, where a copy of the auction catalogue is held, a 2006 auction at Greenway included 102 lots of books, ‘of which 31 were [Christie’s] own novels. The rest was almost all non-fiction.’ Email to author, 28 September 2017.
- 22.
John Curran, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (New York: Harper, 2009), 22. The first two chapters of Postern of Fate concern Tuppence Beresford’s attachment to beloved books, which she describes as not being ‘the sort of books people would want to buy very much. I don’t think there are any books of rare value or anything like that.’ Christie, Postern of Fate, 7.
- 23.
http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk, accessed 19 September 2017.
- 24.
http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/3172079, accessed 19 September 2017. Katherine Ward, senior house steward of Greenway, confirms that the ‘only inscription or annotations to this volume is the one on the flyleaf of Agatha Miller 1904. The rest of the book is as printed.’ Email to author, 4 October 2017.
- 25.
Morgan, Agatha Christie, 4.
- 26.
Ibid., 238.
- 27.
Ibid., 241.
- 28.
Ibid., 248.
- 29.
Agatha Christie to Max Mallowan, 17 November 1943, courtesy of the Christie Archive Trust. Christie’s birthday was 15 September and the anniversary of her marriage to Mallowan, 11 September. Morgan, Agatha Christie, 8, 188. Christie’s letters have yet to be published; indeed, of those personal letters in the possession of the Trust, only approximately a third has yet been transcribed. Her professional correspondence is housed in a variety of archives, including the libraries of the universities of Exeter and Reading, the British Library, and the Bodleian Library. Joe Keogh, email to author, 13 December 2016.
- 30.
In an apparent oversight, Morgan’s biography identifies ‘glass bottles, copies of Pinter’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels’ as gifts from Christie, rather than to her. Morgan, Agatha Christie, 330. Keogh points out that the ‘difficulty with tracking down AC’s books is that she had so many houses at any given time. In later years her main residence was Wallingford with Max, while Greenway was her summer house which she shared with her family. Rosalind and Anthony Hicks then moved into Greenway so when it was handed over to the National Trust it was filled with their belongings also. I would guess that Wallingford was the place where AC kept her main library but when she died it became Max’s house, so when he died it was his wider family that handled the contents and I think it was at that point the trail goes cold. We’d love to track down significant books like AC’s copy of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis, but there’s no trace of it any later than 1976 when Billy Collins [Christie’s English publisher] in his address at AC’s memorial service states she kept it by her bedside. That would definitely have been her Wallingford bedside, so if we can’t track down a book of that significance I think it very unlikely we’ll ever see that set of Austen novels again.’ Email to author, 3 October 2017.
- 31.
Francis Wyndham, ‘The Algebra of Agatha Christie’, The Sunday Times, 27 February 1966, 26. Christie’s remarks on Austen were quoted by Jeffrey Feinman in The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie (New York: Award Books, 1975), 23; otherwise, Christie’s declaration of her ‘love’ for Austen has apparently been neither republished nor remarked upon.
- 32.
In a typically light-hearted comment about her possible literary influences, Christie comments that the first Dickens novel she and her mother read aloud was Nicholas Nickleby, in which her own ‘favourite character was the old gentleman who courted Mrs Nickleby by throwing vegetable marrows over the wall. Can this be one of the reasons why I made Hercule Poirot retire to grow vegetable marrows? Who can say?’ Christie, Autobiography, 147–8.
- 33.
Wyndham, ‘Algebra’, 26.
- 34.
I have written extensively elsewhere about feminine accomplishments and women’s authorship in nineteenth-century England; see in particular Juliette Wells, ‘“In Music She Had Always Used to Feel Alone in the World”: Jane Austen, Solitude, and the Artistic Woman’, Persuasions 26 (2004): 98–110.
- 35.
Christie, Autobiography, 198. Gill points out the similarity to Gwendolen Harleth’s experience in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Gill, Agatha Christie, 23.
- 36.
Shaw and Vanacker stress that Miss Marple is an ‘intellectual force’ and identify her as ‘a structuralist detective,’ in contrast to the rationalist Poirot. They point out, too, that Miss Marple, ‘while never voicing feminist statements, is not only a genuinely independent woman but also the chief sleuth whom police inspectors hold in awe.’ Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting, 64, 74, 33.
- 37.
Agatha Christie, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, in Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1985), 14; Agatha Christie, At Bertram’s Hotel (1965; London: Collins/Fontana 1978), 97. Shaw and Vanacker infer that Miss Marple’s ‘father was a clergyman and that in general she belongs to a clerical family,’ another link to Austen. Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting, 53.
- 38.
J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 9. On Austen-Leigh’s sources and perspective, see Sutherland’s introduction to that volume, as well as her monograph Jane Austen’s Textual Lives.
- 39.
William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: A Family Record, 2nd ed (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913), 341.
- 40.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Jane Austen at Sixty’, reprinted in B. C. Southam, ed., Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage 1870–1940, vol. 2 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 301. Many of the works quoted by Southam in this volume, including this essay by Woolf, are under copyright and can thus be difficult to access in their original form. I quote from Southam’s excerpted reprintings both for this reason and because of the familiarity his selections have acquired.
- 41.
[Virginia Woolf], review of Life and Letters and Old Friends and New Faces by Sybil G. Brinton, reprinted in Southam, ed., Critical Heritage, 244.
- 42.
Christie, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, 3. In her Autobiography, Christie described Miss Marple as ‘born at the age of sixty-five to seventy’ (436).
- 43.
Agatha Christie, Nemesis (1971; London: Fontana/Collins 1984), 192. Shaw and Vanacker persuasively infer that ‘not only has Jane Marple been lively and attractive when young but … she still is young … [and] it is this single state and its activities which keep her young.’ Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting, 57. On literary and cultural contexts for Miss Marple’s spinsterhood, see ibid., 39–43 and 49–50.
- 44.
Austen-Leigh, Memoir, 70.
- 45.
[Henry Austen], ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’ (1818), reprinted in Austen-Leigh, Memoir, ed. Sutherland, 139. On the attribution to Henry of the 1818 ‘Biographical Notice’, see Juliette Wells, ‘A Note on Henry Austen’s Authorship of the “Biographical Notice”’, Persuasions On-Line 38.1 (2017).
- 46.
[Henry Austen], ‘Memoir of Miss Austen’ (1833), reprinted in Austen-Leigh, Memoir, ed. Sutherland, 152.
- 47.
Agatha Christie, ‘A Christmas Tragedy’, in Miss Marple, 145, 148.
- 48.
Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (1930; London: Fontana/Collins, 1972), 162.
- 49.
Agatha Christie, ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’, in Miss Marple, 260.
- 50.
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library (1941; New York: HarperPaperbacks, 1992), 101.
- 51.
Christie, The Body in the Library, 101, 153.
- 52.
Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced (1950; Glasgow: Fontana/Collins 1984), 36.
- 53.
Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, reprinted in Southam, ed., Critical Heritage, 230–1.
- 54.
Arnold Bennett, ‘Books and Persons’, reprinted in Southam, ed., Critical Heritage, 289.
- 55.
Austen-Leigh and Austen-Leigh, Life in Letters, 239.
- 56.
Deidre Lynch, ‘At Home with Jane Austen’, in Cultural Institutions of the Novel, ed. Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 176–7.
- 57.
See John Morton, Tennyson Among the Novelists (London: Continuum, 2010), 107–8.
- 58.
Mark Aldridge places the Hickson adaptations in full historical context in Agatha Christie on Screen (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 217–28. I concur fully with Shaw and Vanacker’s observation that ‘Joan Hickson’s particular contribution to the evolution of the character is her head-on-one-side, shrewd and evaluative gaze, which perhaps gives a more penetrating and disconcerting impression than the novels of how Miss Marple looks.’ Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting, 93.
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Wells, J. (2018). ‘Dear Aunt Jane’: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Jane Austen. In: Hopkins, L. (eds) After Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95894-1_10
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