Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries

Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries is a research work written by Gillian Gill first published by Freepress (New York) in hardcover in 1990. Gillian Gill is a Welsh-American writer and academic who specializes in biography and feminist theory who has taught at US universities such as taught at Northeastern University, Wellesley, Harvard, and Yale and has written several biographies of notable women.

In the introduction to this title, Gill argues that Christie's success has made her "uninteresting" to critics. She is a woman writer who "fails to go mad, have interesting" lovers, bear illegitimate children, commit suicide, or die in poverty", and therefore to the world of critics and biographers, she is "simply no fun". Her "relentless productivity over almost sixty years, her accelerating sales and ever-increasing fame, her personal inviolability to misfortune and disaster" made her unrewarding as a unrewarding a biographical subject. Only one event, her disappearance in 1926 has attracted critical attention. Yet biographical information shows that this event is much less typical of Christie than believed. "Whereas the events linked to the disappearance connotepassion, despair, failure, betrayal, madness, Christie's life as a whole is a model of equanimity, happiness, success, control, and sanity."

At the same time, Christie was intensely private and this makes it difficult to understand her personality and attitudes directly. An indirect approach is needed, by studying Christie as she expresses herself in her novels. The book is therefore part biography and part in-depth analysis of several of her works through, of course, a feminist lens. Gill notes that Christie made inroads for feminism in portraying heroines who were as capable and independent as herself. She also concludes that Christie was not "Mrs. Average Conservative Housewife inexplicably producing international best-sellers whom traditional critics have portrayed". Rather, she was a committed writer and dedicated professional who showed that it is possible for "a woman of talent to have fame, fortune, and happiness, books and babies, to marry her personal ideal of happiness with the world's idea of success."