Jane Marple, better known as Miss Marple, is a fictional character in Agatha Christie's crime novels and short stories. Miss Marple lives in the fictional English village of St Mary Mead and acts as an amateur consulting detective. Often characterised as an elderly spinster, she is one of Christie's best-known 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", 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 and her last appearance was in Sleeping Murder in 1976.
Contents
Origins
Marple is based on friends of Christie's step grandmother, Margaret Miller (née West). Christie attributed the inspiration for the character to multiple 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". 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; thus, Miss Marple was born.
It is popularly believed that Christie took the character's name from Marple railway station, which she often passed through on her way to visit her sister Margaret Watts at Abney Hall, Cheshire. According to a letter, said to be from Christie to a fan, and dated 1968, the name was instead inspired by a visit to an auction at Marple Hall in the same town:
I expect you will be interested to learn that at the time I was writing The Thirteen Problems (starting with a series of 6 short stories for a magazine) I was staying with a sister of mine in Cheshire and we went to a sale at Marple Hall – the house alone, she said, was worth seeing, a beautiful old manor, belonging to the Bradshaws descended from Judge Bradshaw who sentenced Charles I.
It was a very good sale with fine old Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture and at it I bought 2 Jacobean oak chairs which I still have – wanting a name for my "old maid" character I called her Jane Marple.
However, while the auction was held in July 1929 (and two Jacobean armchairs are still at Christie's Greenway Estate), the first six Miss Marple stories had already been published in The Royal Magazine from December 1927 to May 1928.
Character
Miss Marple makes her first full-length appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage. In this early portrayal she is a gleeful gossip, sharp-tongued, and not always sympathetic. The residents of St Mary Mead respect her but often find her nosiness and habit of assuming the worst in others tiresome. In later novels, however, Christie softened her character: Miss Marple becomes a kinder, more thoughtful figure, though still an astute observer of human nature.
Her method of detection rests on shrewd intelligence and long observation of village life, which she believes reveals the full range of human failings. She frequently interprets new crimes by recalling past incidents and she has a talent for recognising the hidden significance of apparently casual remarks. At times she is aided by her friend Sir Henry Clithering, a retired Metropolitan Police commissioner, who supplies her with official information.
Miss Marple never married and has no close family apart from her nephew, Raymond West, a "well-known author". He appears in several stories with his wife, the artist Joyce Lemprière and is portrayed as overestimating his own intellect while underestimating his aunt's. Following the retirement of her long-time maid Florence, Miss Marple occasionally employs girls from a local orphanage to train as housemaids. She also endures a brief period with the tiresome Miss Knight as her companion, before settling in later years with Cherry Baker, first introduced in The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side.
Although of independent means, Miss Marple is not wealthy and relies in her old age on financial support from Raymond. She is a gentlewoman rather than a member of the aristocracy, yet moves comfortably in upper-class circles. Christie hints at a broad education: in They Do It with Mirrors, Miss Marple recalls growing up in a cathedral close and attending an Italian finishing school with Ruth Van Rydock and Caroline "Carrie" Louise Serrocold.
Christie was notably inconsistent about the character's age. In 1957's 4:50 from Paddington, Miss Marple claims she will be "90 next year", but in At Bertram's Hotel (1965) she is implied to be about 75, having first visited the hotel some sixty years earlier at the age of fourteen. Across the 41 years between her first and last novels – excluding the posthumously published Sleeping Murder – she does age, though not in a strictly realistic fashion. Miss Marple herself sometimes shows frailty, such as needing a holiday after illness in A Caribbean Mystery, yet she is vigorous again in Nemesis, set only sixteen months later.