Her father died when she was a child, and until she was sixteen she was educated at home by her mother. The family often traveled abroad when finances were limited. She attended finishing school in Paris and initially considered a musical career. As a child she read detective novels extensively and improvised mysteries with her sister, Madge. Her childhood dreams were haunted by the image of "The Gunman," pointing to a concern with the violence underlying seemingly "respectable" societies, a theme of many of her later works.
In 1912 Miller became engaged to Archibald Christie; they were married on Christmas Eve, 1914. Christie served as a colonel in the Royal Air Corps, so the couple was separated for most of the war years. Agatha Christie continued to live at Ashfield, her family's Victorian villa in Torquay. She volunteered as a nurse and worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser in local hospitals. Her knowledge of poisons, evident in many of her mysteries, developed through these experiences. After the war, her husband went into business in London, while Christie remained at home with her daughter, Rosalind, born in 1919.
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