Agatha Christie
1 book analyzed
Biography
Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was already the most popular mystery writer in the world when she published And Then There Were None in 1939. Born in Torquay, Devon — the same coastline where Soldier Island is imagined to sit — she had published over twenty novels and was famous for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She had also survived one of the strangest episodes in British literary history: in 1926, after discovering her husband was having an affair, she disappeared for eleven days. Her car was found abandoned. A nationwide search ensued. She was eventually found in a Harrogate hotel, registered under her husband's mistress's name, apparently suffering from amnesia. She never explained it. The episode became a cultural obsession that Christie never addressed publicly. And Then There Were None, with its sustained theme of psychic collapse under guilt and its portrait of a woman (Vera) destroyed by the gap between her self-image and her actions, may be the closest she came to explaining anything.