Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says 'She was thrillingly scintillatingly modern'. Her life was 'modern' too: she went surfing in Hawaii she loved fast cars and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of a massively internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who despite the obstacles of class and gender became an astonishingly successful working woman.