Agatha Christie’s Ordeal By Innocence, her 50th novel, has been dramatized by the BBC and is one of her more powerful. She draws on her own family experiences for her portrayal of the fictional Argyle family, an ill-assorted, incestuous household ‘like a buttoned-up, English version of a family in a Tennessee Williams play’ as one reviewer put it.
Christie is the best-selling writer of all time with 80 detective novels. Only the Bible has sold more than her four billion copies. No mean achievement for someone known as slow as a child, possibly dyslexic.
She was born 15 September 1890 4am Torquay, England and had an isolated childhood, home educated with her two elder siblings off at boarding school. Her mother was nervous and reclusive, partly a result of having been farmed out to an aunt as a child after her father was killed, leaving her with lifelong feelings of rejection. Christie’s eldest brother on whom Jacko in the novel is probably based, was wildly unpredictable and irresponsible and squandered away his fortune.
Agatha Christie was a Sun Virgo square Mars in Sagittarius, so hard-working and feisty. She also had a communicative Air Grand Trine of a Libra Moon trine a creative, slightly paranormal Neptune Pluto in Gemini in her 10th trine Jupiter in Aquarius. Pluto in the 10th makes for influence, Neptune is artistic and the combination of the pair can be larger than life as her output and achievements showed. Her 2nd house Mercury in Libra was widely trine Pluto Neptune and the North Node in Gemini. She was clearly designed for a money-making and ambitious life from unlikely beginnings.
What’s interesting in light of the new information about her family is that her 10th house (= mother) Neptune Pluto squares Saturn – which describes a neurotic, bleak, locked-in maternal influence. She was fond of her mother and protective – Moon trine Jupiter trine Neptune Pluto – but it left its mark. As well as laying the seeds of her future talent.
Venus in Scorpio is in her 3rd house of siblings square Jupiter, sextile Saturn and inconjunct Neptune Pluto – Venus Jupiter applied to her brother would make him a superficial charmer, emotionally detached, controlling and unreliable.