Unfinished Portrait

by Agatha Christie Book 2 in the Mary Westmacott series.

First published 1934

Amazon

4.2(625)

On an island, a woman named Celia has reached the point of suicide when she meets the painter Larraby and begins telling him her life story. She recalls an imaginative childhood, a difficult adolescence, marriage, motherhood and the collapse of the relationship around which she built her adult identity.

The narration moves from late Victorian and Edwardian assumptions into the disruption of war and the interwar years. Through Celia’s memories, the novel examines emotional dependence, the social vulnerability of divorce and the challenge of separating an authentic self from the roles of daughter, wife and mother.