Unearthing creativity from pain

'That turmoil was the making of her'

The idea for this blog post / reflection came from enjoying a documentary series on the BBC iplayer by Lucy Worsely.

Lucy explored the life and work of Agatha Christie. I have only read one of Agatha Christie's books a long time ago (A cat amongst the pigeons). I was intrigued by her life and how one person from her lifetime became synonymous with the murder mystery genre.

In this documentary, Lucy shares pieces of Agatha Christie's life through historic documents such as photographs, letters and notes. She visits pertinent areas of where she spent her time and begins by inviting the viewer to discover where Agatha may have got her imagination from when sharing the story of her lonely childhood. Agatha Christie did not spend much time around other children and lived in a big estate in Devon with her parents. Her parents experienced financial stress and she was mainly in the company of her mother. Her family socialised with other upper middle class people. She wrote horror stories as a way to pass the time. I wondered whether she learned how to channel her childhood emotions this way.

She began a career in writing when she was a teenager and invented characters based on what she observed of the intriguing people who were in her life. During the first World War, Agatha worked as a nurse and channelled her creativity into a magazine which brought some light-heartedness to what would have been a harrowing and horrific time. This is where she also learned about pharmaceuticals and came up with clever plot twists and ideas. Agatha also learned of the double-standards of people she grew up experiencing respectfully and how they changed in demeanour when holding a position of status and authority over her and her colleagues.

As her life unfolded in the documentary, it was not just the social circumstances that Agatha found ways to channel into her creativity, her life circumstances also impacted on the evolution of her writing. This seemed to be most apparent when Agatha Christie married a man she adored who later left her for a younger woman. When grieving this relationship the documentary demonstrates how her writing provided a catharsis for her and these come across in dialogue and depth of the characters.

The documentary continued to show how Agatha was drawn to archelogy and followed her passion for learning about the ancient Egyptians by travelling to digs. This is where she met her second husband who she spent the rest of her life with despite the ongoing turmoil in the world. There was a moving part of the documentary where Agatha's letters to her husband were expressing her fear of losing him forever during a time of physical separation. It made me think about her father who seemed quite absent early on in her life. I also thought about how her painful breakup with her ex-husband may have added to the pain of an abandonment wound. I shed a tea when I heard Lucy read aloud Agatha's husband's letter to her following her death. It sounded like a beautiful relationship built on mutual love and respect.

The quintessential aspect of an Agatha Christie story is the way she organises a story around a belief and then subverts the reader's expectations. The timing of her career spanned two wars and post-war modernity. At a time when people were uprooted from norms and safety, she drew inspiration from pain and created stories of deceit, greed, betrayal and murder.

It makes me think about how we evolve from our circumstances, the conditions that surround us give rise to different ways of being. Instead of being those ways, Agatha seemed to channel them into Poirot, Miss Marple and all the other characters along the way. In her stories there are people of reputable standing in society who are equally scrutinised by a suspicious eye - did they do it? I liked how the documentary made links between post-war modernity and shifting norms and the popularity of stories where people who invite respect and trust were shown to be just as fallible and deceitful as those judged more unfairly. I see her as a socially subversive writer now. Before I thought they were delightful 'whodunnit' stories to pass the time but now, after learning about how she managed to do many things a woman was not expected to do all those decades ago, I have the utmost respect for her. Though she would not escape my scrutinising eye in the closed circle of a drawing room!

Reference

BBC (2025) Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsely on the mystery queen. Available on:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d9c9v5 Last accessed: 2nd May 2025