Abstract
Establishing herself as a “new woman writer of detective stories”, Agatha Christie constructed her authorial persona in dialogue with feedback from readers and publishers. Throughout her career, she negotiated how her books were marketed and how she herself was presented, exploiting ready stereotypes about femininity and domesticity. This chapter explores Christie’s emergence into a masculine marketplace (The Mysterious Affair at Styles), her use of gendered parody to emphasize the limitations of popular fiction (The Man in the Brown Suit), her renegotiation of generic norms (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) and her development of a fictional alter ego, Ariadne Oliver. Reading “Agatha Christie” as a strategic authorial construction opens her texts up to new and subversive readings, according to which human identity itself is fundamentally unfixed.
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Bernthal, J.C. (2016). Constructing Agatha Christie. In: Queering Agatha Christie. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33533-9_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33533-9_2
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-33532-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-33533-9
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