Even Agatha Christie fails the test of political correctness. A few weeks after the controversy over the linguistic revisions and corrections in the books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming in the name of a new shared sensibility, a new one is opening up on the novels of The Queen of Yellow.
Some of Agatha Christie’s most famous works have been reviewed and partially corrected by “sensitive readers” (very popular figures in the UK and US publishing industry who screen publications for offensive terms and descriptions in order to improve diversity and inclusion in publishing) by editor HarperCollins , which adapts to the delicate contemporaneity by eliminating terms considered offensive and racist.
The revision, begun in 2020, will result in the re-release of the novels in a version that, in light of our modernity, cleanses the inadequacy of the stories and characters narrated by Christie from 1920 to 1976, the year of her death. The reflections of the rigorous Hercule Poirot and the complicated investigations of Miss Marple are rewritten, in some cases censored with passages removed entirely.
Eliminating terms common in Christie’s day, used to classify people of a different ethnic group than the white British, who often suffered from a colonialist mentality and were conditioned by racial prejudice. The “N-word” or words like “Jew”, “Gypsy”, but also “Oriental” and “Indian temperament” to characterize a character disappear, the “natives” become the “natives” and you don’t read more than one Bust of a female figure defined as “black marble”.
For example, in Poirot on the Nile, all references to the “Nubians”, to the physical appearance of the non-English characters, disappear, the comments about children with “disgusting eyes and noses” are also deleted, and the servant no longer becomes in a black one man to be identified. Or in Miss Marple in the Caribbean, one will no longer read the protagonist’s reflection on the hotel employee with “so beautiful and white teeth”.
Controversy immediately arose on social networks: many enthusiasts speak of a “murder” committed against the author and her works, and there are those who, more diplomatically, demand a step back by sharing an original edition alongside the revised and corrected one maintained, as already proposed by the Puffin publishing house, which offers a “classic collection” without posthumous interventions.