Lucy Worsley

This notion that writing was just one of a string of hobbies or accomplishments was more widespread than you might think. Madge sent her stories to Vanity Fair for pin money. Agatha’s grandmother Polly, skilled at embroidery, used her needle to support her family. In each case, what was considered a harmless pastime led to cash. Nothing could be further from the Romantic idea of the artist: a starving, struggling figure in his garret, hurling his genius at his lonely task. But then female writers have always fitted their work in around the edges of ordinary life. ‘How much more interesting it would be if I could say that I always longed to be a writer,’ Agatha confessed, later, but ‘such an idea never came into my head.’

Ethel was working full-time in a mill at thirteen; she had her first poem published in the Blackburn Times at eighteen. ‘We think we have found a new singer,’ wrote a critic, ‘what might such a singer accomplish if she had more leisure than hard factory work affords?’9 In 1913 Ethel went on to write a novel, Miss Nobody, thought to be the first published in Britain by a working-class woman. Had Agatha likewise needed to earn a living, she may well have remained a Miss Nobody too.