Miss Marple Series
Miss Marple
| Miss Jane Marple | |
|---|---|
Illustration by Gilbert Wilkinson of Miss Marple (December 1927 issue of The Royal Magazine)
| |
| First appearance | "The Tuesday Night Club" |
| Last appearance | Sleeping Murder |
| Created by | Agatha Christie |
| Portrayed by | Gracie Fields Margaret Rutherford Angela Lansbury Dulcie Gray Helen Hayes Ita Ever Joan Hickson Geraldine McEwan June Whitfield Julia McKenzie Isabella Parriss (playing young Miss Marple) Julie Cox (playing Miss Marple as a young woman.) Keiko Kishi (Junko Mabuchi) |
| Voiced by | Kaoru Yachigusa |
| Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Title | Miss |
| Occupation | Amateur detective |
| Family | Raymond West (nephew) David West (great-nephew) Lionel West (great-nephew) |
| Relatives | Joan West (niece-in-law) Mabel Denham (niece) Henry (uncle) Antony (cousin) Gordon (cousin) Fanny Godfrey (cousin)[1] Lady Ethel Merridew (cousin)[2] Thomas (uncle) Helen (aunt) Diane "Bunch" Harmon (goddaughter) |
| Religion | Church of England (Christian) |
| Nationality | British |
Miss Marple is a fictional character in Agatha Christie's crime novels and short stories. Jane Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur consulting detective. She is one of the best known of Christie's characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen. Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927, "The Tuesday Night Club",[3] which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems (1932). Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.
Contents
Origins[edit]
The character of Miss Marple is based on friends of Christie's step grandmother/aunt (Margaret Miller, née West).[4] Christie attributed the inspiration for the character of Miss Marple to a number of sources, stating that Miss Marple was "the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my step grandmother's Ealing cronies – old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl".[5] Christie also used material from her fictional creation, spinster Caroline Sheppard, who appeared in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. When Michael Morton adapted the novel for the stage, he replaced the character of Caroline with a young girl. This change saddened Christie and she determined to give old maids a voice: Miss Marple was born.[6]
Christie may have taken the name from Marple railway station, through which she passed, or from Marple Hall, near her sister Madge's home at Abney Hall.[7][8]
Character[edit]
The character of Jane Marple in the first Miss Marple book, The Murder at the Vicarage, is markedly different from how she appears in later books. This early version of Miss Marple is a gleeful gossip and not an especially nice woman. The citizens of St. Mary Mead like her but are often tired by her nosy nature and how she seems to expect the worst of everyone. In later books, she becomes more modern and a kinder person.
Miss Marple solves difficult crimes because of her shrewd intelligence, and St. Mary Mead, over her lifetime, has given her seemingly infinite examples of the negative side of human nature. Crimes always remind her of a parallel incident, although acquaintances may be bored by analogies that often lead her to a deeper realization about the true nature of a crime. She also has a remarkable ability to latch onto a casual comment and connect it to the case at hand. In several stories, she is able to rely on her acquaintance with Sir Henry Clithering, a retired commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, for official information when required.
Miss Marple never married and has no close living relatives. Her nephew, the "well-known author" Raymond West, appears in some stories, including The Thirteen Problems, Sleeping Murder and Ingots of Gold (which also feature his wife, Joyce Lemprière). Raymond overestimates himself and underestimates his aunt's mental acuity. Miss Marple employs young women (including Clara, Emily, Alice, Esther, Gwenda, and Amy) from a nearby orphanage, whom she trains for service as general housemaids after the retirement of her long-time maid-housekeeper, faithful Florence. She was briefly looked after by her irritating companion, Miss Knight. In her later years, companion Cherry Baker, first introduced in The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side, lives in.
Miss Marple has never worked for her living and is of independent means, although she benefits in her old age from the financial support of Raymond West, her nephew (A Caribbean Mystery, 1964). She is not herself from the aristocracy or landed gentry, but is quite at home among them and would probably have been happy to describe herself as "genteel"; indeed, a gentlewoman. Miss Marple may thus be considered a female version of that staple of British detective fiction, the gentleman detective. She demonstrates a remarkably thorough education, including some art courses that involved study of human anatomy through the study of human cadavers. In They Do It with Mirrors (1952), it is revealed that Miss Marple grew up in a cathedral close, and that she studied at an Italian finishing school with Americans Ruth Van Rydock and Caroline "Carrie" Louise Serrocold.
While Miss Marple is described as "an old lady" in many of the stories, her age is mentioned in "At Bertram's Hotel", where it is said she visited the hotel when she was fourteen and almost sixty years have passed since then. Excluding Sleeping Murder, forty-one years passed between the first and last-written novels, and many characters grow and age. An example would be the Vicar's nephew: in The Murder at the Vicarage, the Reverend Clement's nephew Dennis is a teenager; in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, it is mentioned that the nephew is now grown and successful and has a career. The effects of ageing are seen on Miss Marple, such as needing a holiday after illness in A Caribbean Mystery but she is if anything more agile in Nemesis, set only sixteen months later.
Miss Marple's background is described in some detail, albeit in glimpses across the novels and short stories in which she appears. She has a very large family, including a sister, the mother of Raymond and Mabel Denham, a young woman who was accused of poisoning her husband Geoffrey (The Thumb Mark of St. Peter).
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Agatha Christie
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Agatha Christie
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