Bundle Brent
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent is a fictional character of two of the Agatha Christie novels, The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), described as a spirited "it girl".
Family
Bundle was the eldest daughter of Clement Edward Alistair Brent, 9th
The Brents' seat was Chimneys, a country house based on Abney Hall, Cheshire.[3] The family’s residual links with the Foreign Office, including the presumption, resented by the 9th Marquess, that the house would continue to be available for purposes of state, as it had been when his late brother was in Government, were an important ingredient of the two Chimneys novels.
Character
Bundle’s age is not explicitly given in either novel, but in The Secret of Chimneys, Bundle describes an incident that took place seven years before and says: "One of the footmen told me when I was twelve years old", which makes her 19 years old.[4] That would be consistent with ages given or hazarded for characters whom readers would assume were, broadly speaking, her contemporaries.[citation needed] As a child she was "long-legged" and "impish",[5] growing into a “tall, dark” adult with an “attractive boyish face”.[6] She was resourceful, headstrong, vivacious and charming, with sharp, penetrative grey eyes that could be disconcerting to others.[7]
"Simply it"
Bundle was very much a young woman of her times, with many of the characteristics of a "
Bundle owned a
Suitors
Bundle was attractive to men. Towards the end of The Seven Dials Mystery, she received two proposals of marriage, the first from George Lomax, a pompous
Appearances
Novels
The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery were published (and explicitly set) four years apart. The intervening period was momentous for Agatha Christie herself. The Secret of Chimneys, which concerned the future of the Herzoslovakian royal family and their jewels, and in 1928 she was divorced from her first husband.
In The Seven Dials Mystery, Bundle turned to amateur sleuthing after the death of two Foreign Office officials, both house guests of the Coote family, who had been renting Chimneys. She was drawn, with a male companion, to a secret society in the Seven Dials district of London, in effect competing with Superintendent Battle to get to the bottom of a sinister intrigue. According to her biographer, Christie played around with names and characters when drafting the story, although she always intended it to be a vehicle for the energetic young woman she had introduced in The Secret of Chimneys.[21]
There were subtle differences between the Bundle of 1925 and that of 1929. Despite such consistent traits as her fast driving, she was seen as more mature in the second novel. For example, Lomax, who, in The Secret of Chimneys had dismissed her as "charming, simply charming, but quite a child",[13] reminded her father, in The Seven Dials Mystery, that "she is no longer a child. She is a very charming and talented woman";[22] and, of course, by then, Lomax wished to marry her. Bundle's role was, in any case, more central in Seven Dials; despite Battle's crucial contribution, she was clearly the heroine and intended to be so.
Wodehousian comparisons
Several commentators[
Television and stage
A dramatisation of The Seven Dials Mystery was broadcast by London Weekend Television in 1980, with Cheryl Campbell (born 1949) in the role of Bundle Brent. This production was, with LWT's Why Didn't They Ask Evans? and Partners in Crime, in the vanguard of a resurgence of classic crime fiction on British television in the 1980s.[28]
At Christmas 2010 ITV broadcast an adaptation of The Secret of Chimneys, set in 1955 (but harking back to a ball in 1932), which, unlike the novel, imported Christie's perennial Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) and made a number of other changes. Dervla Kirwan, in her late thirties, played Bundle, who, though still the daughter of Lord Caterham, was cast as the sister of 23-year-old Lady Virginia Revel (Charlotte Salt), an unrelated character in the original story. Of the two, Lady Virginia appeared to have more in common with the Bundle of the novels. The Radio Times observed that this production was "classic Agatha Christie, even though it's only distantly related to her original ... purists will be utterly flummoxed - and the plot has more holes in it than the murder victim".[29]
An audiobook of The Seven Dials Mystery, read by Emilia Fox, was released in 2005, while Christie's stage play, Chimneys, which she wrote in 1931, eventually received its premiere at Pitlochry, Scotland in 2006. In the latter production, Bundle was played by Michele Gallagher.[30]
Notes
- ^ Christie used the spelling "Marquis", although in Britain, this is usually applied only to Scottish creations that pre-date the Act of Union of 1707 (see Whitaker's Almanack, annually). It is possible that the Caterham earldom was created earlier than 1707, but "Caterham", a town in Surrey, England, just south of Croydon, is not suggestive of a Scottish peerage.
- ^ Agatha Christie (1925) The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 15
- ^ See Jared Cade (1998) Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days; Vanessa Wagstaff & Stephen Pool (2004) Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Companion
- ^ Agatha Christie (1925) The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 23.
- ^ Agatha Christie (1929) The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 12
- ^ The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 10
- ^ The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 16
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 1
- ^ The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 21
- ^ See The Agatha Christie Collection, Part 13 (Planet Three, 2002)
- ^ Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 24; The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 5
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 5
- ^ a b The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 3
- ^ In The Secret of Chimneys. Eversleigh's age "at a guess" was 25.
- ^ The Secret of Chimneys, Chapter 1
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 31
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 33
- ^ Herzoslovakia was a fictional European state.
- ^ See, for example, Robert Barnard (1980) A Talent to Deceive
- ^ See generally Jared Cade (1998) Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
- ^ Janet Morgan (1984) Agatha Christie
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 29
- ^ See, for example, The Agatha Christie Collection: Part 11 (Planet Three, 2002)
- ^ Agatha Christie (1977) An Autobiography
- ^ Vanessa Wagstaff & Stephen Pool (2004) Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Companion
- ^ Geoffrey Jaggard (1967) Wooster’s World
- ^ The Seven Dials Mystery, Chapter 12
- ^ Alwyn W Turner (2010) Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s
- ^ Jane Rackham in Radio Times, 18–31 December 2010
- ^ "The Sound of My Voice Media Release | Press". 2009-06-22.