If we are to believe Agatha Christie, then the author was not at all like her creation Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth of St Mary Mead: ‘I never can see why anybody thinks that I resemble Miss Marple in any way,’ she once complained. Instead, Christie – who was born 134 years ago this week – felt that she was much more like her recurring character Ariadne Oliver, an apple-munching writer of crime fiction who despaired of making her most famous detective a Finn (Christie’s own Hercule Poirot was proudly Belgian), and whose complaints often mirrored those in Christie’s own life, including problems with taxation and disagreements over adaptations of her work. But was Christie right in her assertion?
There was something of the author in Miss Marple, even if she didn’t always recognise it
The most convincing evidence for Christie’s claim is a simple matter of age. Miss Marple first appeared at the end of 1927, when Christie was just 37 years old, and so clearly some obvious points of comparison fail here, with Miss Marple at least three decades older than her creator. And yet, there are a few parallels. After the breakdown of her marriage and the loss of her mother, both in 1926, Christie needed to be an independent woman who could make her own way in the world without the support of a husband and parents, just as Miss Marple needed to. Miss Marple also had to contend with the difficulties of people ignoring or overlooking her, just as Agatha Christie sometimes had to, thanks to her shyness.
At the beginning of her career, Christie had battled with a ‘dragon’ at her first publisher, who insisted that cocoa should be spelled ‘coco’, and would not be convinced otherwise. Christie lost this fight, and it rankled with her for decades, inspiring her to be more confident when she felt something was wrong. This may have just been a disagreement about spelling, but we see similarities with Miss Marple, a character who, while polite and quiet, knows what is right and what is wrong and is not afraid to speak out about it when needed.
Although Agatha Christie was not Miss Marple, as the author grew older St Mary Mead’s finest aged only very slightly over the course of four decades. This meant that author and character started to grow closer together, both in age and in experience. An early version of the 1957 novel 4.50 from Paddington put Miss Marple’s age at 90, which was felt to be a shock too far for readers, and so the mention was excised from the British edition. In the 1960s, Miss Marple’s age seems to settle down to around 70 years old again, approximately the same age as when we first met her – although by now Christie had turned 70 herself, in September 1960. This explains why some of Miss Marple’s memories are now the same as Agatha Christie’s: Christie biographer Laura Thompson has noted that several things remembered by Miss Marple in 1965’s At Bertram’s Hotel, are experiences shared by Agatha, such as the details of theatre trips and shopping at old Army and Navy Stores.
But perhaps the most convincing example that Christie became more like her creation came later in the decade, when the author suggested a solution to a real-life murder. In the earliest Miss Marple stories, a group of friends and acquaintances each shared a mystery, to be solved by the others, despite the information being second-hand.
In a 1968 edition of the Sunday Times Magazine, Christie did precisely the same, at the end of an article concerning the 1876 murder of British lawyer Charles Bravo. The Bravo story had clearly fascinated Christie (it is mentioned in three of her books), but the strange case had never been solved: Bravo was poisoned but took three days to die, and yet he refused to share any information that would identify the murderer or method of poisoning. No-one was ever arrested for the death, and theories included an unhappy housekeeper murdering her master, or even Bravo accidentally poisoning himself. However, for Christie, it was a combination of the facts and her understanding of human nature that allowed her to offer a solution to the crime, just as Miss Marple had done. As far as Christie was concerned, it was the lure of a love affair with Bravo’s wife that led to a local doctor committing the crime. This was a common motive in Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and indeed it is not unusual to find that a seemingly trustworthy doctor is the villain in a Miss Marple mystery.
Like any creation, there was something of the author in Miss Marple, even if she didn’t always recognise it. Perhaps that is why she took such pleasure in revisiting her expert on wickedness throughout her life. Miss Marple was an original creation, but also a conduit to Christie’s past, as the character allowed her to remember her grandmother and her friends, who had made such an impression in a bygone age.
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