The country-house setting was especially relished by the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie. This interest is discussed in both Hilary Macaskill’s Agatha Christie At Home (2009) and Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life (2018), studies on which this article draws. Beginning with her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), country houses, and the full-rig grandeur of their early 20thcentury life, feature heavily in her writing (although by no means in every story). In and out of these houses, Poirot and Hastings, and, elsewhere, Miss Marple, set their sleuthing minds to work (Fig 3).
Born Agatha Miller in 1890, Christie herself came from comfortably-off stock. Her parents were not country-house dwellers, but certainly part of the gentrified and professional world we encounter in her novels. They moved in county circles; she enjoyed amateur theatricals at Cockington Court, and also met her first husband, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at a dance at Ugbrooke Castle, given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh.
She grew up in Ashfield, a much-loved, rambling Regency villa on the edge of Torquay (Christie sold it only in the 1930s and desperately tried to buy it back, unsuccessfully, after the Second World War, when she discovered it was to be demolished).
Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 27, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Country Life UK dergisinin November 27, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
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