Agatha Christie’s England Through History, Literature, and Film

Agatha Christie's novels are not only terrific murder mysteries (and the best selling and most translated works of all time), they are also windows into early twentieth-century English society. In her fictional world, Christie explored contemporary social relations shaped by rank, class, gender, age, and marital status, as well as the tangled web of ties among nostalgic country villages, seaside resort towns, and the London metropolis. Students read the Miss Marple novel The Body in the Library (1942), and watch two British television adaptations of the famed elder spinster detective solving the same crime. Students also analyze several Miss Marple short stories (1927-1939) and curated historical sources, including newspaper reporting on Christie's own mysterious disappearance in 1926. More broadly, students investigate the ways individuals and institutions experienced, maintained, and/or challenged prevailing norms of detective work and policing, Englishness, class, gender, and generational divides during the 1920s-1940s.