In the following essay, Steinberg reports on McCullough's Roman history series and offers insight into the author's motivations for writing it.

In the following review, Grimstad provides a brief plot summary of An Indecent Obsession and comments that the novel lacks complexity.

Below, Mitchell offers an unfavorable review of A Creed for the Third Millennium.

In the following review, Gray provides an unfavorable review of A Creed for the Third Millennium.

Belying its label, Colleen McCullough's new chart-topper [An Indecent Obsession] is in the mould of one of those improving tales for young ladies with which our grandmothers were expected to educate their souls. "Or, Sister Langtry chooses the Path of Duty" would have made an excellent sub-title, containing enough of a clue perhaps to save the reader from spending the whole volume worrying mildly about the identity of the "indecent obsession" and drawing various, consisten...

Ward X [the setting for "An Indecent Obsession"] has reached a certain balance with the help of a nurse-catalyst, Sister Honour Langtry, who initially emerges as almost a stock character in British fiction—a combination of Jean Brodie and Mary Poppins. Into this stabilized environment comes a new element: a soldier named Michael who has been placed on Ward X for no discernible reason…. The environment is one of the chief villains in this novel. Half the action is concerned with w...

One would not describe An Indecent Obsession as spellbinding, nor think of Australian novelist Colleen McCullough's treatment here of an army nurse assigned to oversee a half-dozen mentally disordered patients at the end of World War II as in any way comparable, let's say, to Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Her book has neither the emotional power nor the intellectual toughness associated with that American novel. Still, like her earlier work The Thorn Birds, this is...

Tim is a simple, effective first novel by Colleen McCullough whose native Australia serves as the book's setting. The novel is direct rather than subtle. It tells a gentle, spare story of a growing relationship and a mutual awakening of Mary Horton, a 45-year-old spinster who has never paid any attention to her own emotional needs in her climb from orphanhood to financial success, and Tim Melville, a strikingly beautiful, 25-year-old, mentally retarded boy whose innocence and gentleness are still int...

[In An Indecent Obsession, the] second world war is winding down. On an unidentified island in the Pacific, in a hospital to which wounded Australian soldiers have been evacuated is a special ward—Ward X—reserved exclusively for those soldiers whose wounds are not physical but psychological. They are "troppo," the Australian word for soldiers who have broken under the stresses of warfare…. Sister (Australian for nurse) Honour Langtry, a 30-year-old unmarried woman from an ...

This first novel of awakenings [Tim] is a lovely and refreshing addition to tales of love. It is also, however, a story with a difference, one that might be characterized as love triumphant, but not love without its bittersweet shadings. Mary Horton is a middle-aged, successful businesswoman, a spinster. Raised an orphan, she has lived her life alone, has relied on her own discipline and self-sufficiency—until Tim comes along. He is 25, an Adonis in body, a child in spirit…. Colleen McCullough...

The course of this novel [Tim] is rather predictable and the bitterness of the last two pages does not restore realism to what is basically a very romantic tale—but it is a good, warm, rather lovely story with some delightful characters. And the slang of Australia in the somewhat idealized dialogue is spicy and, to northern-hemisphere ears, fresh and pleasant…. [The] plot is not only idyllic, it is a little too pat. Yet, it is worked out with skill and the people are real, made all the more re...