Guy Cuthbertson

He celebrates it, worships it indeed.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was the most extreme instance and the most controversial.

Connie Chatterley cheats on her disabled wealthy war veteran mine owner husband and the novel tells of her passionate affair with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors who was an officer in the war too but nonetheless represents a rejection of the modern exploitative money-grabbing world of Sir Clifford.

It was unpublishable and had to be censored in order to be published in the UK in 1932 in an authorised edition.

Christie too has also been controversial and there have been attempts to change her books, although not for that reason.

Her offence has been more in terms of race than sex.

It is interesting, though, how what we consider offensive has changed, even in terms of language.

Lawrence used the F word and C word in Lady Chatterley's Lover, which has certainly been controversial, but Christie used the N word in, for instance, the Marple novel Sleeping Murder.

In that sense, Miss Marple might be more likely to offend now than Lady Chatterley's Lover is.

Miss Marple first appeared at almost the exact same time as Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was published privately in Italy in 1928.

Miss Marple first appeared in print in December 1927, so it is nice to think of Marple's stories and Lady Chatterley's Lover arriving at the same time.

A mail-order copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover lurking on the bedside table in 1928 as someone read a Marple story before bed, the two newly minted women, each a fresh and exciting discovery for the reader.

We should bring those two great women, Connie and Jane, together.

Incidentally, Jane is a name that Connie is also given in Lady Chatterley's Lover, somewhat indecently.

Christie said in her autobiography that it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure she had taken in portraying Dr Shepherd's sister in The Murder of Roger Aykroyd, the novel published in 1926, the year of The Plumed Serpent, and the year in which Lawrence started writing the story of Lady Chatterley.

Christie was nonetheless vague about why she created Miss Marple.

One cannot help wondering whether this happily never married singleton, who has never experienced the horrors or disappointments of marriage, was partly created, however unconsciously, in response to the painful collapse of Christie's own marriage during 1926 following her husband's adultery.

In Miss Marple books we see a spinster with no sex life living among well-dressed genteel folk in a chocolate box England of good manners, afternoon tea and sexual repression.

We don't expect sex.

Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst, the great expert on repression, was an avid reader of Agatha Christie's work and perhaps it was the repression that attracted him.