One of the joys of rereading old novels is all the things you missed before in your eagerness to get the story. i think i mentioned the one about the fellow whom they thought had defected from England to Moscow, hoping he hadn't, in the British idiom, "gone West."
Lately i reread one of my all-time favorites, "Cat Among the Pigeons." The novel is somewhat more than 300 pages long. In those pages, three women are referred to in terms marking them as unusual. Essentially, these women are unusual because they do not give way to their emotions in extreme situations.
Well, why not? And why would such a response be seen as unusual? Maybe the not extraordinary women are simply conforming to expectations and training?
Two young girls are also described in similar terms. One is "sensible," and "deserving of a better mother" (ouch). The other is not labeled as such, but her every action is practical and realistic.
Is Agatha being sly? Is she jabbing at the men she lived and worked with?
In this sense, she herself was something of an extraordinary woman also.
With a car stuck in the sand in the extreme heat in the middle of nowhere, she accepted the situation calmly. "No fuss," Agatha quotes him (second husband-to-be Max Mallowan) in her autobiography, "You didn't complain or say it was my fault. It was at that moment I began to think you were wonderful."*
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The short summary at agathachristie.com:http://www.agathachristie.com/stories/cat-among-the-pigeons
The longer, with spoilers and more Wikipedia summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Among_the_Pigeons
and a comment about those Westmacott books: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3667318/Priceless-clues-to-the-real-Agatha-Christie.html
*The long quote is from http://www.sharonmcgregor.com/blog/agatha-christie-and-max-mallowan in case it doesn't show up above.
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