She wrote Elizabeth and Mr Darcy’s son, Charlie, as a “devotee of Socratic love”: gay. Elizabeth’s sister Mary gets kidnapped by a sect leader and held prisoner in a series of tunnels.
Austen fans were aghast that the McCullough rewrite portrayed Elizabeth Bennet as weak and that Mr Darcy had imprisoned her in a sexless, loveless marriage. Against the advice of her publishing friends, she called The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet the literary equivalent of chick lit a “chook book”.
She laughed uproariously at literary critics’ more unflattering assessments of her oeuvre. McCullough’s 1977 runaway bestseller, The Thorn Birds, which sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, was described by Germaine Greer as her favourite “bad book”, and became a mini-series in 1977, starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward. Michael Pate made her first book, Tim, written during her medical years and released in 1974, into a film starring a young Mel Gibson. Another neat story has it that one day, going to town with the intention of buying a coat, she purchased a Blue Bird portable typewriter instead. The neat story goes that McCullough’s medical career was cut short by a soap allergy. Both parents attempted to dissuade their daughter from reading books, she complained, and wanted her to leave school early. When McCullough’s brother, Carl, died of a heart attack swimming off the island of Crete, their father refused to pay to fly Carl’s body back home. McCullough described her father, James, an itinerant cane-cutter who had mistresses, as a “bastard and a miser” and her mother, Laurie, as “bitterly anti-intellectual”.
She was born in Wellington in central west New South Wales in 1937. Perhaps it was this background in science and rational reasoning that gave her such a gimlet-eyed view of her parents. She was a neuroscientist by training, who worked in the Royal North Shore hospital before a decade teaching and researching in the department of neurology at Yale medical school in Connecticut McCullough did not set out to be an author, much less one of the biggest selling Australian authors, although her works would range from the mega-seller epic The Thorn Birds to the historical fiction of Masters of Rome and re-writing Mr Darcy as a heartless Tory prime ministerial wannabe. She composed her novels using a typewriter, relying in those later years on her peripheral vision. She knew even then that her writing days were drawing to a close: the leaking blood vessels and retina damage inflicted by macular degeneration had already stopped her painting and drawing, two other creative loves, because she could no longer see where the brush or nib touched the surface.
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