Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman

by Lucy Worsley

Once, you’d have known everyone who lived in your village. As a Victorian, you were much more likely to live in a town, with a stranger next door. Once, you’d have married someone introduced to you by your parents. But what did you really know about your new husband? Or maid? Or doctor? The new genre of crime fiction took these fears out of the closet at the back of people’s minds, burnished

Interesting

election, the first in which some selected women were allowed to vote. It’s often believed this was a thank-you for the work women had done during the war. But even war workers like Agatha were still excluded from the franchise. She didn’t meet the criteria for eligibility: she wasn’t over thirty, she wasn’t a householder, nor a university graduate. And in fact, widening the franchise had nothing to do with gratitude. Instead, as historian Janet Howarth explains, it was a response to an expansion in the definition of citizenship.

The first women to get to vote

‘to marry and have children, that is the common lot of women. Only one woman in a hundred – more, in a thousand, can make for herself a name and a position.’2

The status of women in some countries has not evolved.

The query only makes sense if you believe in those emerging ‘rules’ for detective fiction, which would not actually be codified until 1929.

An important date