Includes bibliographical references (pages 367-397) and index.

"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was "just" an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was--truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century"--