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NEW YORK, NY /
The New York Times Magazine / Ideas / Health / December 17, 2009
Literary Alzheimer's
Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia? Though some of her biographers have suspected as much, actual evidence was advanced in March by a research team led by Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, professors at the University of Toronto, in a paper called "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia."
The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for "vocabulary size and richness," an increase in repeated phrases (like "all sorts of") and an uptick in indefinite words ("anything," "something") — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer's disease. The results were statistically significant; Christie's lexicon decreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased. Her penultimate novel, "Elephants Can Remember," exhibits a "staggering drop in vocabulary" — of 31 percent — when compared with "Destination Unknown," a novel she wrote 18 years earlier. For Agatha Christie fans, the findings may be proof of a truth they have long recognized: the author's final two books, written in her early 80s, do not hold up against her earlier ones.
Agatha Christie
Christie's body of work lends itself to such analysis because it spans the bulk of an adult life, from age 28, when Christie wrote her first novel, to age 82, when she wrote her last. Still, Hirst cautions, "the question is not early style versus late style, but the late style of someone who is elderly but healthy versus the late style of someone who is elderly but not cognitively healthy." To contextualize their evidence, Lancashire and Hirst plan to analyze the work of P.D. James, a still-healthy writer who has continued to publish into her 80s, as well as the writings of authors like Ross Macdonald who are known to have had Alzheimer's. [
rc]
By Amanda Fortini
Illustration by Cath Riley
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Did Agatha Christie, who wrote several dozen mystery novels during her 53-year career, suffer from Alzheimer's-related dementia? Though some of her biographers have suspected as much, actual evidence was advanced in March by a research team led by Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst, professors at the University of Toronto, in a paper called "Vocabulary Changes in Agatha Christie's Mysteries as an Indication of Dementia."
The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid of textual-analysis software, analyzed them for "vocabulary size and richness," an increase in repeated phrases (like "all sorts of") and an uptick in indefinite words ("anything," "something") — linguistic indicators of the cognitive deficits typical of Alzheimer's disease. The results were statistically significant; Christie's lexicon decreased with age, while both the number of vague words she employed and phrases she repeated increased. Her penultimate novel, "Elephants Can Remember," exhibits a "staggering drop in vocabulary" — of 31 percent — when compared with "Destination Unknown," a novel she wrote 18 years earlier. For Agatha Christie fans, the findings may be proof of a truth they have long recognized: the author's final two books, written in her early 80s, do not hold up against her earlier ones.
Agatha Christie
Christie's body of work lends itself to such analysis because it spans the bulk of an adult life, from age 28, when Christie wrote her first novel, to age 82, when she wrote her last. Still, Hirst cautions, "the question is not early style versus late style, but the late style of someone who is elderly but healthy versus the late style of someone who is elderly but not cognitively healthy." To contextualize their evidence, Lancashire and Hirst plan to analyze the work of P.D. James, a still-healthy writer who has continued to publish into her 80s, as well as the writings of authors like Ross Macdonald who are known to have had Alzheimer's. [rc]
By Amanda Fortini
Illustration by Cath Riley
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
