In this post about Agatha Christie's work and my personal dilemma with it, I mentioned her interesting life.
What do I mean by that?
Agatha Christie was born in Torquay on September 15, 1890 as the youngest of three siblings in a wealthy upper middle class family.
Although it wasn't encouraged by her mother, she learned reading at the age of four, and she was home-schooled in reading, writing, basic arithmetics, and music.
At the age of 11 she lost her father, a year later she started attending a local school, and when she was 15, her mother sent her to Paris where she completed her education.
When she came home again, she and her sick mother decided to spend three months in Egypt.
In 1912, Agatha was introduced to Archibald Christie whom she married in 1914. While Archie was in France during the war, Agatha first volunteered in a hospital and then qualified as an apothecary assistant working at the dispensary which inspired her to use poisoning as the method in her first detective story featuring Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who had come to England as a refugee.
In 1922, the Christies joined Major Belcher's promotional tour for the British Empire Exhibition. During this tour they learned for example how to surf and were among the first Britons to surf standing up. I don't know about you, but the picture of an old/er Agatha is so ingrained in my mind that I have a hard time imagining her on a surfboard, but she enjoyed surfing thoroughly.
In 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce after falling in love with a friend of Major Belcher's, Nancy Neele. After a row, Agatha disappeared which of course led to a huge news story, but also to an extensive search with hundreds of police offers, thousands of volunteers, and even aeroplanes.
11 days later, she was found at a hotel where she had registered under a false name. She never gave an explanation and opinions about whether she disappeared in a fugue state or consciously are divided. Public reaction was mainly negative, also due to the costs of the extensive search.
The divorce went through in 1928, Agatha retained custody of their only child, Rosalind.
In autumn of 1928, Agatha travelled to Istanbul with the Orient Express and on to Baghdad where archeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine, who was a fan of her novels, invited her to the site of Ur. She became friends with them and they invited her to return in 1930.
During that second trip, she met Woolley's assistant who was ordered by Katharine to take Christie on a conducted tour of the country - Max Mallowan who was 13 years younger than her. The way she took everything during that tour in good humor, even getting stuck in the sand of a dry river valley, convinced him that she would make a wonderful life companion, and so he proposed to her just six months later.
This was the beginning of a second life on a different continent for Agatha beside that of a successful writer.
Katharine Woolley, however, didn't want another wife at the site which is probably the reason why the couple went to Nineveh next. In "Murder in Mesopotamia", which Christie - she used the name Mallowan outside her writing career - dedicated to the Woolleys, the victim was inspired by Katharine. According to Mallowan's biographer Henrietta McCall, Katharine was aware that the as difficult portrayed character was based on her and enjoyed the notoriety.
In 1932/33, Max and Agatha worked on their first own dig in Tall Arpachiyah near Nineveh. Both Agatha's celebrity status as a writer and her money helped Max' archeological career as this was the time when digs still had to be sponsored with private money, at least partially.
During the season - fall and spring - they were at the sites, in summer they were in England with Rosalind, and the rest of the time they spent either traveling or staying at home.
Max led the excavations, Agatha, who had taken a drawing course, started by doing drawings, but that wasn't really her thing. So instead she wrote in the morning, in the afternoon she recorded finds and put together broken ceramics.
In 1934, they travelled to Egypt and took a Nile River cruise which inspired one of her most famous novels, Death on the Nile.
Eventually they moved on to digs in Syria.
Agatha found her role by becoming the official photographer which was a hard, exhausting, and demanding task, both the photographing itself, but also the developing of the negatives. She didn't just take pictures, however, but also filmed, black/white and in color. In 1937, she even took a photography course in London which led to more creative experiments, not to her husband's joy as he would have preferred purely scientific photos to creative ones.
Part of their team in Syria for several years was the young architect Robin Macartney who not only assisted by drawing finds, maps, and plans, but also designed an expedition house.
Fascinated by Macartney's drawings, Christie asked him to design a book cover for her. In the end, he designed four dust-wrappers between 1936 and 1938. What she liked best about them was that each cover told something about the story by using elements from it, such as the Ramesses II statues and the Nile cruise steamer for "Death on the Nile", and I totally understand that because it seems to be a concept that publishers struggle with from covers I have seen myself.
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| First edition of "Death on the Nile" with the dust jacket by Robin Macartney via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Excavations came to a halt when WW II broke out, but after the war they came to Nimrud, a site Mallowan had long had his eye on. He became the first director of the British School of Archaeology and thus secured the necessary support for the excavation.
The couple was there throughout the 50s, they lived in the School's building, and while Agatha had a small writing room added to the team house, she also assisted again by collecting, recording, and cleaning artifacts, taking photographs, and restoring ceramics.
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| Nimrud Ivory "Lion of Nimrud" By Unknown - M0tty, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons |
During the war Christie had written the book "Come, Tell Me How You Live" about their time in Syria.
Nimrud was the last site she went to.
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| Bull plaque, one of the Nimrud finds, via Wikimedia Commons, by |
Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976 at Winterbrook House.
Did you already know about Agatha Christie's "second life"? Have you maybe even read her book about it? If so, what did you think?
Sources:
- Agatha Christie's adventurous 'second act' plays out in Mesopotamia in: National Geographic March 21,2019
- Bridget Roddy: Agatha Christie and Archaeology, An Understated Connection on: Trowels and Tribulations: IUP's Archaeology Blog, March 11,2022
- German documentary "Agatha Christie und der Orient" 2021
- BBC Archive 1977 - The World This Weekend, Sir Max Mallowan
- Agatha Christie on Wikipedia
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