Elusive Agatha

 

If someone were to write a biography of you, would the author describe you as elusive? The title of the new biography of Agatha Christie includes the addition - "an elusive woman" because of something that was said of her at one point. It kind of got me thinking about what being elusive would mean.  

Perhaps Agatha was known to be elusive because she practiced in life what became known as a classic "Christie trick" she used in many of her mystery novels - is the hiding of an object in plain sight. 

Or maybe we could say she was elusive about her mysterious disappearance for 11 days, showing up at a hotel in Harrogate with "loss of memory". Newspapers were writing stories about her, search parties (including Dorothy L. Sayers and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) were scouring the countryside for her. Her car was found in a ditch. She was found using a false name staying at a hotel. Was there something more there? Lucy Worsley does a good account of piecing together the story, sensitive to the fact that it could have been a nervous breakdown. Her husband had been seeing someone else and had told her he wanted a divorce. Would that not cause some deep despair? Indeed. 

Agatha had an interesting life and engaged with it in her cheerful countenance. There is something about her that is magnetizing - she really seemed to enjoy life. She liked to try new things, she liked driving, she surfed in Hawaii, she loved to travel to places like Egypt, Bagdad, and the ancient city of Ur. She met her second husband, Max, on such trips and kept going back to the deserts. Many of her novels were written from a tiny desk in the sandy deserts where her husband was an archaeologist. Her real experience on The Orient Express provided her the details and nuances of that exact train journey so her murder mystery novel was accurate in all the details she could possibly maintain.

Perhaps an elusive side of Agatha was her faith. It's hinted at here and there, but it appears that she quietly leaned on her Christian faith to get through difficult times she did have to endure:

Agatha's autobiography implies that what brought her back from the brink was the remembered voice of a woman. A teacher once told her the essence of Christianity was the defeat of despair.

"Those few words," Agatha wrote, "remained with me...they were to come back to me and give me hope at a time when despair had me in its grip." 

Above all, Agatha was an author who was always thinking of her next book, though she would put "married woman" as her profession on her passport. It is clear she was meant to be a writer. She knew that writing was a great joy and she never stopped writing until she passed away January 12, 1976 (47 years ago, age 86). Her view of writing was that "...sometimes I think that is the moment one feels nearest to God, because you have been allowed to feel a little of the joy of pure creation." I wholly agree, Agatha.