It isn’t often that affairs in the literary world find themselves included in Sixty Minutes. And yet last year viewers of this program were presented with an all-out brawl between two literary camps: one supporting the reputation of the Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, the other defending the integrity of the Australian Colleen McCullough. The point of contention was McCullough’s novel The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987), which allegedly plagiarised one of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s lesser known novels, The Blue Castle, originally published in 1926. The fact that one of McCullough’s prime accusers is a New Zealand librarian added to the controversy’s cross-national resonances. Both Montgomery and McCullough are frequently associated with national stereotypes: as McCullough ruefully acknowledges, part of her problem seems to be that she has interfered with an author who is a ‘Canadian icon’.^[1] Montgomery’s writing is recognised as playing a major role in establishing one of the most persistent images of Canadians—as wholesome, vigorous, close to nature.^[2] On the other hand McCullough’s own brashness and sense of herself as a tall poppy under attack draw upon a stereotypically Australian set of images. The authors in play in this controversy, then, are recognisably national, if quite dissimilar. As one critic commented, ‘McCullough’s hearty cowpat jokes would be quite out of place in Montgomery’s world.’^[3]

The textual similarities between The Blue Castle and The Ladies of Missalonghi are striking. In each novel a spinster (Montgomery’s Valancy Stirling, McCullough’s Missy Hungerford) lives with her mother and an old aunt. Each is a dark, pale, flat-chested and brown-eyed woman who contemplates death with pleasure as a release from her restricted and hen-pecked existence. Each wears dresses in a shade known as ‘snuff brown’; each dreams of wearing pink as a bridesmaid; each sleeps in a cold bedroom with a handworked motto on the wall and a passe-partout engraving of a queen. An uncle owns the country store and teases her unmercifully; an enviable and beautiful cousin who ‘keeps all her goods in the shop window’ and is recently engaged is everything Valancy/Missy is not. Suffering from pains around the heart, each spinster consults the doctor; Montgomery’s Valancy comes away from the consultation with a letter containing the prognosis that she has only a year to live; McCullough’s Missy steals an unaddressed letter from the doctor’s desk which states that a patient has no more than a year to live. Valancy/Missy falls in love with a mysterious bachelor, Barney Snaith/John Smith, a ‘jailbird’ in the eyes of the local community. Barney/John is tall, with brown eyes and a grim/flinty smile. Valancy/Missy decides to speak her mind and say what she really thinks about her family; she then leaves home against her mother’s will and proposes to the jailbird. When Barney/John is presented with the doctor’s letter, he agrees to marry the spinster out of compassion and her request for some happiness before death. After marriage Valancy/Missy flourishes into a provocative/eye-catching woman as the groom takes her to a wonderful blue castle/green valley. As a wife she has no money worries; her husband ensures that an empty money jar is always replenished. In the final turn of events, Barney/John is revealed as a wealthy man who changed his name and drifted to Africa, Klondike, China, Brazil, Texas/Klondike, England, South Africa, China. When it is revealed to him that his wife is not about to die from a heart condition, the scene is set for them to live happily ever after, a respectable couple in the eyes of the town. Each novel, then, presents the same trajectory of unfulfilled spinsterhood being replaced by married bliss; the mousy, passive spinster is transformed into a sexual and assertive woman.