BooksObituaryRosalind Hicks
The daughter of Agatha Christie, who fiercely guarded her mother's estate, works and reputationFrom her mother, Agatha Christie, Rosalind Hicks, who has died aged 85, inherited fortitude, stamina and a desire for privacy. Notice in the newspapers was something to be endured.
Her mother's further legacy was a literary estate - the many detective novels, published in dozens of languages, plays, films, two volumes of autobiography - that provided her daughter with a comfortable living and the role, often burdensome, of hawk-eyed protector of the integrity of every manifestation of the published work.
Rosalind had been born in her grandmother's house, Ashfield, in Torquay. Her father, Archie Christie, a hero of the Royal Flying Corps, had returned from the first world war and found work in the City, while her mother's first book, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, had been sent to John Lane. It was published in New York in 1920, London in 1921. Agatha was launched.
But her increasing fame and the family's growing prosperity did not bring contentment. Archie's business life became more difficult, Agatha more lonely, especially when he turned to golf for solace.
In 1926, Rosalind's grandmother died. Clearing Ashfield left Agatha ill and exhausted. Then Archie told her he had fallen in love with someone else. In December, in a state of emotional and mental collapse, she drove away from Styles, the Christies' ominously named new house, and vanished. Her disappearance, half a year after the publication of her clever and manipulative Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, baffled the police and thrilled the press. Its aftermath - Agatha's return, shocked, amnesiac and withdrawn, after she had been found in an hotel in Harrogate, the Christies' divorce, Agatha's inability to discuss the episode with her daughter, years of popular speculation as to what had happened and why - was hard on Rosalind. Only in her 60th year could she bring herself to authorise a biography of her mother.
She saw little of her father after the divorce and his remarriage. In 1930, her mother married again. Rosalind's stepfather, Max Mallowan, the archaeologist, was 15 years younger than her mother. A kindly scholar, delighting in both the intellectual and practical side of his work, he introduced his stepdaughter to archaeology and the Near East.
These expeditions, a London season, and other travel occupied Rosalind, who was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a high colour, until her marriage in 1941, to Hubert Prichard, a regular soldier in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Their son, Mathew, was born in the autumn of 1942.
In October 1944, she learned that Hubert had been killed. Proud, reticent and independent, Rosalind struggled on with a boisterous infant, recalcitrant livestock and the Prichards' large, unheated house on the Welsh/English border, working away grief.
In 1949, she married again: to Anthony Hicks, trained in Oriental studies and as a barrister. Calm and reassuring, he was the ideal companion. For 55 years he and Rosalind travelled, read, and, from 1968, when they moved to a cottage at Greenway, Agatha's house in south Devon, helped to cultivate the great wooded gardens on the banks of the Dart.
It was from Greenway, after Agatha's death in 1976, that Rosalind sent fierce letters to those whom she thought wished to alter, betray or cynically exploit her mother's work. She brought friends and relations to Greenway, to eat her own vegetables, fruit and figs, to walk in the camellia garden and sleep in cool rooms scented with Magnolia grandiflora .
Greenway was a serene harbour, the part of the inheritance from her remarkable, awkward mother that made up for the rest.
She is survived by her husband and her son.
ยท Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Hicks, born August 5 1919; died October 28 2004
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