Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface: Hiding in plain sight -- Part one: Victorian girl - 1890s / 1. The house where I was born -- 2. Insanity in the family -- 3. The thing in the house -- 4. Ruined -- Part two: Edwardian debutante - 1900s / 5. Waiting for the man -- 6. Best Victorian lavatory -- 7. The Gezireh Palace Hotel -- 8. Enter Archibald -- Part three: Wartime nurse - 1914-18 / 9. Torquay Town Hall -- 10. Love and death -- 11. Enter Poirot -- 12. The Moorland Hotel -- Part four: Bright young author - 1920s / 13. Enter London -- 14. Enter Rosalind -- 15. The British mission -- 16. Thrillers -- Part five - 1926 / 17. Sunningdale -- 18. The mysterious affair at Styles -- 19. Disappearance -- 20. The Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel -- 21. Reappearance -- Part six: Plutocratic period - 1930s / 22. Mesopotamia -- 23. Enter Max -- 24. I think I will marry you -- 25. Eight houses -- 26. The golden age -- Part seven: Wartime worker - 1940s / 27. Beneath the bombs -- 28. A daughter's daughter -- 29. Life is rather complicated -- 30. By Mary Westmacott -- Part eight: Taken at the flood - 1950s / 31. A big expensive dream -- 32. They came to Baghdad -- 33. Christie-land after the war -- 34. Second row in the stalls -- 35. A charming grandmother -- Part nine: No swinging - 1960s / 36. The mystery of the Christie fortune -- 37. A queer lot -- 38. Lady detectives -- 39. To know when to go -- Part ten: Curtain - 1970s / 40. Winterbrook -- 41. The funeral -- Sources -- Acknowledgements -- Notes -- Index -- Picture acknowledgements.

'Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was.' 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'. 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 an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.