Unconscious purely, says author of later work

Press, 20 February 1988, Page 23

Unconscious purely, says author of later work

"My theory is . that this was self-destructive behaviour.” Maureen Garvie called the lawyer for the L. M. Montgomery Estate, who told her that a fan in the United States had recently sent a letter to the Green Gables Museum in Prince Edward Island listing points in common between the two books. Marian Hebb, the estate lawyer, said options had been taken out on the movie rights to “The Blue Castle,” and if movie rights to “The Ladies of Missalonghi” were also. sold, this could lead to legal action. “If there is an infringement of copyright; the matter is of grave concern to us,” she told Mrs Garvie. “The Blue Castle,” first published in 1927, was reissued in paperback in 1962 and again in 1972. A new edition is planned for April this year. Another Canadian reader of McCullough’s novels got in touch with Maureen Garvie to say that he had noticed similarities between her book “Indecent Obsession” and an old movie which he saw on television, called “The Hasty Heart.” She says both had the same setting, and the same basic idea of a nurse who had a powerful influence over the men in her charge, but describes it as "a different quality of similarity.” After Maureen Garvie’s revelations were published in Canada, the London “Daily Mail” sent an Australian freelancer to interview Colleen McCullough on Norfolk island.

“She says I attacked her,” says Mrs Garvie, ‘but I don’t think so. I just pointed out these remarkable similarities and said it was an interesting story how this came about. Her interviewer does not find out how it came about — she just says that they were all remarkable coincidences.” In the “Daily Mail” interview, Colleen McCullough says she read Lucy Montgomery as a child. "Perhaps, because I loved her work best of all, my subconscious recorded something. But you have to realise that she was writing in a certain genre; she was writing in ‘period,’ and so was I. There are bound to be similarities because that’s the way things happened in small towns.” She says her book was based on the experiences of herself and her mother, and that the idea of a women setting out to catch a man on the basis that she was dying came to her a long time ago because she had met just such a woman. She described Maureen Garvie’s article as “a hatched job.”