Agatha Christie in dialogue with To the Lighthouse: the modernist artist

This chapter traces Christie's fascination with modernism and explores the anxiety of influence from Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' to two novels by Christie, 'Giant's Bread' published under the literary pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and the later Poirot novel, 'The Hollow'. The chapter explores how Christie's modern artists find artistic and sexual wellbeing in a menage a trois of one form or another, in a trope lifted against the grain from the Woolf novel.