Agatha Christie's Lesser-Known Romance Novels
Romantic Fiction Written Under the Pseudonym of Mary Westmacott
Oct 23, 2008
Throughout the 1920s, Agatha Christie set herself up for a great career as a crime novelist. Her books were published by Collins and had already introduced the famous Hercule Poirot. By 1930, Murder at the Vicarage, the first of the Miss Marple series, had been published.
Agatha Christie was now writing to great acclaim in the crime fiction genre. There is no wonder, then, that Collins were not enamoured by her idea to write her own kind of distinctive romantic novels. She had, of course, written short stories which often centred around the cruelty of love and emotion, but the publishers would need something that would sell.
Inventing the Pseudonym of Mary Westmacott
Collins’ lack of enthusiasm did not prevent her from writing Giant’s Bread in 1930. However, to preserve the persona which had begun to grow around her, of the upper middle-class female crime writer, who loved her family and had a passion for homes and gardens, she created her pseudonym. Through this, she could write about topics in a way she could never have done, had readers realised her true identity.
Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s only child, has stated that the name of the pseudonym was chosen after a deal of forethought. Mary was her second name and she had some distant relations with the surname of Westmacott. And it was by utilising the fusion of these two names that she managed to lead a double life, writing for years as Mary Westmacott and keeping her own identity a secret from both the press and the readership of her crime novels.
The Romantic Novels of Mary Westmacott
All six of Mary Westmacott’s novels were written between 1930 and 1956. In chronological order, they are:
- Giant’s Bread (1930), telling the story of a music-obsessed man, his relationships with his family and the two women he loved;
- Unfinished Portrait (1934), a novel of marriage in turmoil;
- Absent in the Spring (1944), which relays the tale of a woman who is forced to be alone in a desert rest-house and consequently confronts her own feelings for her family. It was rattled out on a typewriter in three days, according to the author herself, during a week’s leave from her wartime job as hospital dispenser. It was also, she says, her most satisfying novel;
- The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947), set in Cornwall and conjuring up reminiscences of the works of Daphne du Maurier, evoking as it does a strong feeling of place and social history;
- A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952). This was written after her exposure as the famous crime writer. It is a novel of the mother-daughter relationship – a battle of the widow and the now adult child;
- The Burden (1956) is the last of the Mary Westmacott novels and reflects the relationship of the juxtaposition of love and hate through a girl’s obsession for her younger sister.
None of these novels are “romantic” in the clichéd sense of the word. You will not find happy endings here. Instead, they describe compulsiveness, obsession, love at its most passionate and destructive. But they allowed the author to release emotions and a creativity of such intensity which could never be realised in her crime fiction.
Novels Rooted in Agatha Christie’s Autobiography
The agonising and often heart-wrenching nature of her writing in the Mary Westmacott novels is steeped in Agatha Christie’s own personal circumstances. Here, her personality, emotions and life are laid bare for the reader. It is unlikely that, without the pseudonym, she would have published some of this work.
Giant’s Bread draws strongly on her experiences of being trained as a singer and a concert pianist in Paris. The tensions in A Daughter’s a Daughter can be seen to encompass those created between Rosalind and herself after breakdown of her marriage to Archie Christie and for years afterwards.
However, nowhere is this use of autobiographical detail more prevalent than in Unfinished Portrait. Her notorious eleven-day disappearance in 1926 is fictionalised in detail, along with Archie’s love for another woman and her own mother’s death. Although it was written once she was remarried, the agony she reveals, and her own sense of self-exposure to the world through this book is tremendously brave and unnerving.
It is evident, then, that Agatha Christie’s creative genius did not stop at the invention of crime-filled plot, red herrings and detectives. She applied it, also, to the truth about love, family and their binding emotions, as she saw, experienced and reflected upon it. And this honesty and integrity is what makes the Mary Westmacott novels such a cruelly underrated treat for Christie fans worldwide.
Bibliography
Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: Six Mary Westmacott Novels, Outlet 1986
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, Harper Collins 2001
Laura Thompson, Priceless Clues to the Real Agatha Christie, www.Telegraph.co.uk, 18/08/2007
Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, Headline 2007
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