Agatha Christie, Lesson #2: "The importance of books, re-reading, solitude and time"

The Victorians hot-housed flowers, but they didn't necessarily hothouse their children. What we can learn from Agatha's low-key, unschooled childhood.

This is the second in a monthly series. The first installment is here.

If you’d met Agatha Christie as a child, you wouldn’t have guessed you were meeting a bestselling author in the making.

We can’t reshape our early years, but we can hope to cultivate some of the habits and advantages Agatha had: a love of reading, a special love of re-reading, time for daydreaming and self-entertainment, and an independent demeanor that seemed to require little validation from others.

First, let’s look at the importance of books in the Christie household. There were lots of them, including many considered off-limits, which of course made them even more intriguing.

Agatha’s intellectually adventurous mother had swung from one position—advocating for girls’ education—to a position we might think of as “unschooling” today. Although elder sister Madge had been sent away to boarding school, by the time Agatha came along, the family philosophy was that girls needed only to run wild as much as possible, giving them “good food, fresh air,” and making sure not to “force their minds in any way possible.” Reading was supposed to stay off-limits until the age of eight. (All but that last part sounds delightful!) 

Young, spunky Agatha, storing up ideas for future books

Agatha’s siblings were much older, so she spent a lot of time alone in the garden, mumbling to herself. Toys were less interesting than the stories taking shape in her own mind. Agatha liked to pretend she was a kitten, and she made up stories involving other kittens. When her nurse remarked to someone else about this pastime, Agatha felt betrayed. “The knowledge that anyone—even Nursie—knew about The Kittens upset me to the core. From that day on I set myself never to murmur aloud in my games. The Kittens were My Kittens and only mine. No one was to know.”

(Do any other Christie fans see a connection between her desire for privacy and her later practice of writing her less formulaic, more psychologically subtle novels under a fiercely guarded pseudonym? “No one was to know.”)

The family’s expectations for Agatha were almost comically low. From An Autobiography:

I myself was always recognized, though quite kindly, as the “slow one” of the family.  The reactions of my mother and my sister were unusually quick—I could never keep up. I was, too, very inarticulate. It was always difficult for me to assemble into words what I wanted to say. “Agatha’s so terribly slow,” was always the cry. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. It did not worry or distress me. I was resigned to being always “the slow one.”  It was not until I was over twenty that I realised that my home standard had been unusually high and that actually I was quite as quick or quicker than average. It is probably one of the causes that have made me a writer.

Even though Agatha didn’t go to school, she did enjoy hearing Nursie tell memorized stories—always the same six stories. (Repetition!) To this repertoire were added read-alouds from storybooks. By staring at the pages, Agatha figured out how to read by herself. Her nurse was compelled to report apologetically one day to Agatha’s mother, “I’m afraid, Ma’am, Miss Agatha can read.”

Mrs. Christie was distressed by the news, but she relented. From then on, Agatha requested books as Christmas and birthday presents. Even so, limits on reading remained. Certain books could only be read on Sundays, and it wasn’t considered virtuous to read storybooks before lunchtime. “Reading story-books was considered slightly too pleasurable to be really virtuous.”

Agatha would claim that writing and spelling were always particularly difficult for her. She didn’t let that stop her from writing daily letters to Nursie, following the servant’s retirement—even if she wrote nearly the same letter day after the day for several months, much to the frustration of her mother, who was tired of wasting the money on all those stamps! (Was doggedness and a willingness to repeat herself part of Agatha’s authorial DNA from the start?)

Once Agatha discovered reading on her own, she became voracious. Re-reading was one of her favorite pastimes; Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, and later, Dickens, were among her favorites. She also started writing stories, even if they were simple and not nearly as good as her sister’s (so thought Agatha herself).

Travel, too, became an early pleasure. When Agatha’s family had money troubles, forcing them to rent out their home in Devon, England and move to France, where the cost of living was cheaper, the future author delighted in adventures. French lessons; hotel escapades; hikes into the countryside! (She was, however, disappointed that the Pyrenees mountains were not as tall as she had imagined.)

Agatha’s childhood, idyllic despite her parents’ financial strain, ended at the age of 11, when Agatha’s father died from pneumonia and kidney disease. Her sister married and left the household soon after, deepening the sense of loss. Only a few years later, her mother would suffer health problems as well. Agatha’s first adolescent trip to Egypt—the location of future novels—was made on the advice of a doctor who advised Mrs. Christie to get away to a warm, dry climate.

When I think about how Agatha Christie came to dominate crime writing, producing a new book every year for most of her life, I think about how her brain was unintentionally shaped into a storytelling machine. She read and re-read, imprinting her mind with the patterns of story. She spent lots of time alone. She walked and wandered, making up tales for her own amusement. Far from wanting an audience in her early years, she eschewed it. She followed her own interests, honing in on writing books after she decided she was insufficiently talented as a singer and pianist. She saw the world from an early age. She didn’t seem to care much what others thought of her.

I’d like to think that last item was Agatha Christie’s secret weapon: an inner strength, even a certain aloofness, honed from an early life spent in easy companionship with herself.

Money would never stop being a problem for the Christies. But it seemed to make no difference to Agatha’s development. Leisure defined her childhood, laying the framework for creativity. A reversal of family fortunes paradoxically opened up new opportunities for family travel and learning.

Years later, new sources of adversity would stoke Agatha’s ambitions as an adult novelist.