Colleen McCullough

by Mary Jean DeMarr

Although best known for The Thorn Birds, a blockbuster family saga set in her native Australia, Colleen McCullough is a versatile novelist who has written in a variety of genres. This is the first full-length examination of her work. It highlights her versatility and her refusal to be confined to any one genre or type of writing, even though that refusal has lost her part of the wide readership she gained with The Thorn Birds. DeMarr discusses, analyzes, and evaluates each of McCullough's nine novels in turn, relates it to the genre to which it belongs, and compares it to her other work. This study also features a biographical chapter and a chapter which discusses the variety of genres in which McCullough has written. . DeMarr shows how McCullough's romances (Tim and The Ladies of Missalonghi) and her other novels which make heavy use of romance elements (The Thorn Birds and An Indecent Obsession) differ dramatically from each other. She also compares McCullough's novels of ideas (A Cr