Agatha Christie: how she came to write
October 29, 2024
“How much more interesting it would be if I could say that I always longed to be a writer” wrote Agatha, in the autobiography she penned between 1950 and 1965. With her legendarily terrible spelling and her tongue-tied, inarticulate, awkwardness when put on the spot, Agatha grew up in awe of the quick and decisive wit of her mother and her older sister and said that the constant refrain of the family was “Agatha’s so terribly slow“. Writing became her way of assembling her words on the page so she did not have to marshal them to come out of her mouth.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on the 15th September 1890 in Torquay in Dorset. She was baptised on 20 November there, for her mother (Clarissa, known as Clara) and her maternal grandmother (Mary Ann) with the name Agatha being apparently only selected on the way to the church on the grounds it was pretty! She had two much older siblings, Madge (Margaret Frary Miller, for her father’s step-mother and father) and Monty (Louis Montant Miller, for his father’s best friend in the USA). Her father, being a gentleman, was a charming layabout with an independent income who loved shopping, music, his club and his wife; her mother was beautiful, worshipped her husband and had a “butterfly mind”, always searching for new and interesting ideas to follow. Her parents had been married in 1878, when Clara Boehmer was 24 and Frederick Alvah Miller was 31. The first two children quickly followed in 1879 (Madge, born in Torquay) and 1880 (Monty, born in New York) and the family settled for good in Torquay in 1881. Agatha appears to have been a lovely surprise, almost a decade later.
Her grandmothers were sisters, although her parents’ marriage was not a cousin marriage. Her Auntie-Grannie, Margaret Miller (née West), was Frederick’s stepmother and Clara’s aunt; Clara was fostered by the Millers after her father’s death in 1863, when her mother struggled to make ends meet to bring up four living children as a twenty-seven year old widow living in the Channel Islands. It is possible that the fostering of one of her children was something that she had in view as early as 1861, when she named her youngest child Harry Miller Boehmer, two years before her sister married Mr Miller).
Madge was the recipient of her mother’s early ideas on education – she was sent to boarding school in Brighton, at what later became Rodean, and her headmistress urged her to apply to Girton College, Cambridge, to continue her education. Although her parents were considered very forward-thinking to have sent their elder daughter away to school, the family were universally horrified by that plan, and Madge chose to go to Paris to be “finished” before going to New York (at vast expense) to make her social debut on her 17th birthday at the Hotel Waldorf on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan. She wrote short stories that were published in Vanity Fair – to her father’s enormous pride – and was considered quick-witted and entertaining, like her mother before her. She also painted and took part in Amateur Dramatics, eventually writing a play which had a respectable run on the London stage. The whole family was excited by words and puzzles – Agatha recalls Sunday quizzes with her uncles at her grandmother Miller’s house in Ealing in the summer, when her grandmother Boehmer would also visit to spar gently with her sister. Monty was educated at Harrow and became a charming bon viveur, but could never do maths and was considered “intellectually backward”.
By the time Agatha was learning to talk, her mother had embraced a totally opposite educational idea, that children should develop at their own pace and have no formal learning at all. She believed Agatha should not be taught to read until she was eight, and was perturbed when the child achieved that for herself at the age of four. There was no real formal teaching in Agatha’s childhood and she considered herself “the slow one” of the family – Madge was always there first with witty repartee and Agatha felt tongue-tied and inarticulate. Her father later taught her mathematics, which they both enjoyed, unlike her mother who passed her difficulty with numbers on to Monty. But nonetheless, Agatha grew up in a household full of new ideas – her mother often dabbled with religious ideas too, trying variously Roman Catholicism, Unitarianism, Theosophy and Zoroastrianism before returned to the Church of England – and with free run of her father’s extensive library (except the books that were locked in his study – mostly French plays, apparently, the subject of which we can only speculate!).
At nine and ten years younger than her siblings, Agatha grew up like an only child and made her own entertainment. She had a hugely rich and varied internal life, making up stories, characters, complicated railway lines in the garden and groups of imaginary friends, most famously first The Kittens and later, the girls at The School. The girls were fully-fledged characters with different ages, looks and personalities who grew up with Agatha and were eventually married off, or retired into seclusion in the country, but never aged above twenty three or so. She enjoyed thinking of these friends all her life – she says “even when I was grown up I spared them a thought now and then”[1] and they must have honed her eye for creating character. These friends tried on her clothes, gardened, rode the imaginary railway and played an awful lot of croquet, the garden pastime of choice for well-brought up young ladies at the turn of the twentieth century.
Agatha was also an inveterate people-watcher, and picker-up of snippets of conversation the would give her ideas for novels. She said herself, “unless they were apposite or interesting, I tucked away any scraps of information that came to me, locked them up, as it were, in a file inside my head. This was incomprehensible to the rest of my family, who were all extrovert talkers”.[2]
Agatha’s first foray into writing came before 1914, when she was recovering from unfluenza and her mother suggested she write a story to stave off boredom. She wrote The House of Beauty, later rewritten and published as The House of Dreams in 1926. This started a phase of short story writing, and she submitted several to various publications under the pseudonyms “Mack Miller” and “Nathaniel Miller”, names culled from her own family tree. Success was not forthcoming.
Frederick Miller had died in 1901, of pneumonia, which threw the family into a chaos of grief and financial trouble. Madge had been married the following year, to the son of Clara’s best school friend and Monty joined the army, which meant both of them were reasonably well set up, at least for a time (although Monty had inherited his father’s love of spending money, rather than earning it). Agatha was launched into society, in Cairo (where it was cheaper and Clara’s health would hopefully improve) in 1908. Staying at the Gezirah Palace Hotel gave Agatha plenty of scope to people-watch.
The final strand of what led to Agatha Christie’s first novel was pushed by the First World War. In late 1913, she took First Aid and Home Nursing classes that were popular and joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment that came into play when war broke out. She felt she really suited nursing and had a vocation for it – particularly managing tricky patients who tried sneaky ways to get hold of alcohol, or cause chaos with high temperatures, assisted by a mercury thermometer and a radiator – but another attack of influenza saw her off the wards for almost a month. When she returned in late 1916, she was moved to the dispensary. This enabled her to develop both a working knowledge of poisons, and to write in the quiet moments.
[1] Ibid. part II, section IV, para 43
[2] Ibid. part II, section V, para 20