civilized life and that little details about people's behavior reveal their fundamental characters (Wagoner 2).
The child was often left to herself to find ways of amusing her self, and she would do so with elaborately imagined companions with adventures the child would create for them. Early and unrestricted reading also helped maker her a writer in later life. She learned to read before she was five, and her father undertook then to teach her to write and to do arithmetic. Her sister tried to teach her French. Like many children of her time and class, she was not sent to school. She also had no regular governess, but she did have a young Frenchwoman as a companion-teacher for three years:
This sort of training, with a brief interval at dancing school, is all the formal education Agatha Christie remembered before her father's death when she was eleven. This fact seems to have made her occasionally uneasy, but throughout her life she remained skeptical about schooling and inclined to believe that giving children free access to shelves full of children's books might be the best way to educate them (Wagoner 3).
She believed that her childhood exposure to certain attitudes was more important to her than any specific information others tried to impart. She would assert that she was never educated at all and repeatedly insisted that her own best training had derived from her early encounter with Victorian attitudes (Wagoner 2-4).
During her adolescence, Agatha wrote a number of efforts, including a novel and some short stories which she was unable to sell. During a discussion of some detective fiction of the era, her sister remarked that writing that sort of thing would be too difficult for Agatha. She did not then start a detective novel, but she was fired up to do so and to prove her sister wrong. She met and was engaged to Archibald Christie, a junior officer in the Flying Corps, but they postponed their marriage...