Agatha Christie (1891–1976), probably the best-known British novelist of the twentieth century, bought Greenway as a summer house in 1938 with her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan (1904–1978), the distinguished archaeologist of the Middle East. It had been built by a ship-owning importer, Roope Harris Roope, between 1772 and 1780, and was given its present form by James Marwood Elton, a merchant adventurer of Bristol in 1815. Occupied by evacuated children, and then by US troops, during the Second World War, it did become the permanent home of Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind Prichard, her son Mathew, and her husband Anthony Hicks, all of whom gave the house to the National Trust in 2000 and later its contents, in 2006 and who had added most of the paintings. Agatha was more a collector of all sorts of other things: straw-work boxes, papier-mâché, Tunbridge ware, Stevengraph. There are family portraits by Nathaniel Baird, William Logsdail and Agatha, aged 4, 'Lost in Reverie', by the New York artist Douglas Connah.