Agatha Christie’s Unfinished Portrait Describes Lifelong, Normal, Multiple Personality as Leading to Both her Literary Career and "Gone Girl" Fugue

Agatha Christie’s discussion of her mysterious, sensational, real-life disappearance in 1926—see my post of October 5, 2014—was not in her autobiography, but in Unfinished Portrait, one of the novels she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

The novel tells the story of Celia.

Age 3: “Nobody knew that as Celia walked sedately along the road she was in reality mounted upon a white palfrey…She was on different occasions a duchess, a princess, a goose girl, and a beggar maid…Most of her world was inside her head” (1, p. 33-34).

That is, she switched into the subjectively-real identities of a duchess, etc., and experienced herself as having these alternate personalities for various periods of time. This is usually lumped together with “imaginary companions” or “imaginary playmates” or “imaginary friends,” but, to be more precise, this was imaginary impersonation (in which the child switches into alternate personalities).

Age 5½: “Celia displayed an insatiable curiosity about words…By the time she was five and a half Celia could read all the story books…Fairy stories were her passion. Stories of real-life children did not interest her” (1, p. 40).

Age 10-19: “Celia still spent much of her time alone. Although she had [real friends to tea]—they were not nearly so real to her as ‘the girls’ [which] were creations of Celia’s imagination. She knew all about them—what they looked like, what they wore, what they felt and thought” (1, p. 101-102) They included Ethelred Smith, Annie Brown, Isabella Sullivan, Ella Graves, and Sue de Vete. At age 19, when Celia herself was engaged to be married, “she married off ‘the girls’” (1, p. 172).

Age 24: “Celia invented a new person. Her name was Hazel,” and also a young man, Owen (1, p. 221). “Whenever Celia had a little leisure, or when she was wheeling [her daughter] to the Park, [their] story went on in her mind. It occurred to her one day that she might write it down. She might, in fact, make a book of it…It wasn’t quite so easy when it came to writing it down. Her mind had always gone on about six paragraphs farther than the one she was writing down—and then by the time she got to that, the exact wording had gone out of her head” (1, pp. 221-222).

Then, when she had had some initial success in getting published, and there appeared to be no problem in her family life, her husband shocked her by announcing that he had found someone new and he wanted a divorce.

Celia’s Fugue: “She walked for a long time—it was raining and wet…She couldn’t remember what she was walking for…What was her own name? How frightening—she couldn’t remember…” (1, p. 261).

The writing career and fugue are mentioned only very briefly. But the novel is interesting for its portrait of the psychological development, since early childhood, of a person who could have a real writing career, and, in a crisis, a real fugue.

Why did “Mary Westmacott” write about this, and not Agatha Christie? Maybe Agatha Christie never did remember what happened, but her Mary Westmacott personality did.

1. Mary Westmacott [pseudonym of Agatha Christie]. Unfinished Portrait [1934]. New York, Jove Books, 1987.