|
Colleen Margaretta McCullough (married name Robinson, previously Ion-Robinson;〔the age,com/colleen-mccullough=author-of-the-thorn-birds-dies-220150129-13dka.html〕〔(The Peerage ). Retrieved 2 February 2015〕 1 June 193729 January 2015) was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being ''The Thorn Birds''. ==Life== McCullough was born in 1937 in Wellington, in the Central West region of New South Wales,〔About Colleen McCullough http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/m/colleen-mccullough/ Retrieved 2009-08-15〕 to James and Laurie McCullough.〔(''Enough Rope'' - Transcript of McCullough interview with Andrew Denton ) (24 September 2007)〕 Her mother was a New Zealander of part-Māori descent. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also "a voracious reader".〔Mary Jean DeMarr, Colleen McCullough: a critical companion, Page 2〕 Her family eventually settled in Sydney where she attended Holy Cross College Woollahra, having a strong interest in both science and the humanities. She had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned in the Mediterranean when he was 25. She based a character in ''The Thorn Birds'' on him, and also wrote about him in ''Life Without the Boring Bits''.〔Jason Steger, "McCullough cut through the small talk". (Sydney Morning Herald, 31 January 2015 ). Retrieved 2 February 2015〕 Before her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist.〔 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.〔 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 ten years from April 1967 to 1976 researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. It was while at Yale that she wrote her first two books. One of these, ''The Thorn Birds'', became an international best seller that in 1983 was turned into one of the most watched television mini-series of all time.〔 The success of these books enabled her to give up her medical-scientific career and to try to "live on her own terms"〔Mary Jean DeMarr, ''Colleen McCullough: a critical companion'', p. 3.〕 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.〔 They married in 1984.〔 Under his birth name Cedric Newton Ion-Robinson, he was a member of the Norfolk Legislative Assembly. He changed his name formally to Ric Newton Ion Robinson in 2002. 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" that Elizabeth Bennet was rewritten as weak, and Mr Darcy as savage. "She is one of the strongest, liveliest heroines in literature … () 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?"〔http://www.stevedow.com.au/Default.aspx?id=360〕 McCullough died on 29 January 2015, at the age of 77, on Norfolk Island from apparent kidney failure after suffering from a series of small strokes. She had suffered from failing eyesight and was confined to a wheelchair.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds, dies )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Colleen McCullough」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|