Editing Colleen McCullough (section)

==Life==
McCullough was born in 1937 in [[Wellington, New South Wales|Wellington]], in the [[Central West (New South Wales)|Central West]] region of [[New South Wales]],<ref>[http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/colleen-mccullough "About Colleen McCullough"], fantasticfiction.co.uk; retrieved 3 January 2016.</ref> to James and Laurie McCullough.<ref name="rope">{{Cite web |url=http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s2041318.htm |title='Enough Rope' – Transcript of McCullough interview with Andrew Denton |website=[[Australian Broadcasting Corporation]] |access-date=25 September 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150215060917/http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s2041318.htm |archive-date=15 February 2015 |url-status=bot: unknown }}</ref> Her father was of Irish descent and her mother was a New Zealander of part-[[Māori people|Māori]] descent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also "a voracious reader".<ref name="Mary Jean DeMarr Page 2">Mary Jean DeMarr, Colleen McCullough: a critical companion, p. 2</ref>

Her family eventually settled in [[Sydney]] where she attended Holy Cross College, [[Woollahra]],<ref name=guardian>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/30/colleen-mccullough|title=Colleen McCullough obituary|work=The Guardian|date=30 January 2015|access-date=30 January 2015|author=Cheetham, Anthony}}</ref> having a strong interest in both science and the humanities.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-29/australian-author-colleen-mccullough-dies/6055952|title=Colleen McCullough: Internationally acclaimed Australian Thorn Birds author dies aged 77|work=ABC News|date=29 January 2015|access-date=1 February 2015}}</ref>

She had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned off the coast of [[Crete]] when he was 25 while trying to rescue tourists in difficulty. She based a character in ''The Thorn Birds'' on him, and also wrote about him in ''Life Without the Boring Bits''.<ref>Jason Steger, "McCullough cut through the small talk". [http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/the-thorn-birds-author-colleen-mccullough-cut-through-the-small-talk-20150130-131smu.html Profile], ''Sydney Morning Herald'', 31 January 2015; retrieved 2 February 2015.</ref>

Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist.<ref name="Mary Jean DeMarr Page 2"/> In her first year of medical studies at the [[University of Sydney]] she suffered [[dermatitis]] from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of becoming a medical doctor. Instead, she switched to [[neuroscience]] and worked at [[Royal North Shore Hospital]] in Sydney.<ref name=guardian/>

In 1963, McCullough moved for four years to the United Kingdom; at the [[Great Ormond Street Hospital]] in London she met the chairman of the neurology department at [[Yale University]] who offered her a research associate job at Yale. She spent 10 years (April 1967 to 1976) researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the [[Yale Medical School]] in [[New Haven, Connecticut]], United States. While at Yale she wrote her first two books. One of these, ''[[The Thorn Birds]]'', became an international bestseller and one of the best selling books in history, with sales of over 30 million copies worldwide, that in 1983 inspired one of the most-watched television miniseries of all time.<ref name="nyt"/>

Following ''The Thorn Birds'', McCullough wrote her magnum opus: seven novels on the life and times of [[Julius Caesar]], each a colossus weighing in at up to 1,000 pages. ''The Masters of Rome'' series preoccupied her for almost 30 years, from the early 1980s to the publication of the final volume in 2007. The research was a monumental task: a library of several thousand books and monographs on every aspect of Roman history and civilisation accumulated on the shelves of her home. She drew maps of cities and battlefields, scoured the world's museums for busts and inscriptions, consulted experts in a dozen universities and recorded every known fact about her subject and his times.<ref name="GuardianOb">{{cite news |last1=Dow |first1=Steve |title=Colleen McCullough: the Thorn Birds author and 'charmer' remembered |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/30/colleen-mccullough-the-thorn-birds-author-and-charmer-remembered |access-date=17 January 2022 |work=The Guardian |date=30 January 2015 |language=en}}</ref>

The success of these books enabled her to give up her medical-scientific career and to try to "live on [her] own terms."<ref>Mary Jean DeMarr, ''Colleen McCullough: a critical companion'', p. 3.</ref> In the late 1970s, after stints in London and Connecticut, she settled on the isolation of [[Norfolk Island]], off the coast of mainland Australia, where she met her husband, Ric Robinson.<ref name="nyt"/> They married in April 1984.{{citation needed|date=October 2020}} Under his birth name Cedric Newton Ion-Robinson, he was a member of the [[Norfolk Island Legislative Assembly]]. He changed his name formally to Ric Newton Ion Robinson in 2002.{{citation needed|date=March 2016}}

McCullough's 2008 novel, ''The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet'' engendered controversy with her reworking of characters from [[Jane Austen]]'s ''[[Pride and Prejudice]]''. [[Susannah Fullerton]], the president of the Jane Austen Society of Australia, said she "shuddered" while reading the novel, as she felt that [[Elizabeth Bennet]] was rewritten as weak, and [[Mr. Darcy]] as savage. Fullerton said: "[Elizabeth] is one of the strongest, liveliest heroines in literature … [and] Darcy's generosity of spirit and nobility of character make her fall in love with him – why should those essential traits in both of them change in 20 years?"<ref>[http://www.stevedow.com.au/Default.aspx?id=360 ''The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet''], stevedow.com.au; accessed 3 January 2016.</ref>