Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

Начало книги

Part I AshfieldPart II ‘Girls and Boys Come out to Play’Part III Growing upPart IV Flirting, Courting, Banns Up, MarriagePart V WarPart VI Round the WorldPart VII The Land of Lost ContentPart VIII Second SpringPart IX Life with MaxPart X The Second WarPart XI Autumn

EpilogueSearchable TermsAbout the AuthorCopyrightAbout the Publisher

PREFACE

Agatha Christie began to write this book in April 1950; she finished it some fifteen years later when she was 75 years old. Any book written over so long a period must contain certain repetitions and inconsistencies and these have been tidied up. Nothing of importance has been omitted, however: substantially, this is the autobiography as she would have wished it to appear.

She ended it when she was 75 because, as she put it, ‘it seems the right moment to stop. Because, as far as life is concerned, that is all there is to say.’ The last ten years of her life saw some notable triumphs–the film of Murder on the Orient Express; the continued phenomenal run of The Mousetrap; sales of her books throughout the world growing massively year by year and in the United States taking the position at the top of the best-seller charts which had for long been hers as of right in Britain and the Commonwealth; her appointment in 1971 as a Dame of the British Empire. Yet these are no more than extra laurels for achievements that in her own mind were already behind her. In 1965 she could truthfully write…‘I am satisfied. I have done what I want to do.’

Читать дальше →