Agatha Christie and the 20th Century Woman : Rewriting Female Justice

This book undertakes a cross-examination of Agatha Christie’s writing to gauge her authorial response to the evolving place of women in society, using her career-long strategy of editing, revising, and adapting her works as a tool for interrogating her ongoing efforts to reflect the contemporary world.The laws governing women and their legal status were in dramatic flux throughout her lifetime, meaning that Christie experienced a transformation of everyday structures as both an authorial witness and as a woman affected by revolutionary societal shifts. Through the lenses of feminist studies, genetic criticism, archival studies, and adaptation studies, Mary Anna Evans puts Christie’s published texts into conversation with unpublished notes, drafts, correspondence, and historical documents held in public and private archives. Agatha Christie and the Twentieth Century Woman provides new insights into the work of this juggernaut of crime fiction through a historical contextualization that reveals her long-term interest in failures of the justice system and, in particular, in female vengeance as a response to those failures.

Covering well-known works such as Murder on the Orient Express, Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There Were None, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and little-discussed texts including “Magnolia Blossom,” “The Water Bus,” “Philomel Cottage,” “The Wife of the Kenite,” and “Swan Song,” this book presents genetic dossiers of Christie’s works that document how they evolved into their present form. Agatha Christie and the Twentieth Century Woman’s examination of Christie’s notebook pages and unpublished dramatic adaptations of works, including The Stranger and Hostile Witness, supports a cross-disciplinary, forensic analysis of her work that is as insightful as it is important.