Introduction

Abstract

Two aspects motivated this project: the first was the awareness that my reading of Christie, and what I found in her texts, seemed at odds with much of the criticism of her, particularly when it came to gender. I wanted to find a way of arguing that, plying her craft during the first half of the twentieth century, Christie was writing during a period of intense gender renegotiation in relation to the modern world and that a political conservatism did not necessarily rule out a questioning and even subversive attitude to cultural gender expectations. Where Christie’s assumptions about class remained conservative and often reinforced retrogade, hidebound social divisions, her representation of femininity contested traditional expectations and found much in common with more left-wing writers such as Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, writing during the same period. The second aspect was that many critics, especially the more recent feminist attempts at recuperation of Christie, have tended to focus on just a few texts and make over-large generalisations about her oeuvre from those few examples. I felt a real need to document what was actually present in the texts and for that reason this work is unashamedly textual in its focus. Given such a practice, for example, it is now less possible for critics to argue that Christie’s novels show a ‘dislike of career women’, because of one reference in the Autobiography written in her seventies, since I have demonstrated a whole raft of paeans on the pleasure and adventure of different careers, from schoolmistress to archaeologist and secretary.