Best-selling Canberra-based author Kate Grenville has come under fire over her new novel, based on the life of First Fleet marine lieutenant William Dawes.
British author Jane Rogers has accused Grenville of implying on her website that the novel, The Lieutenant, is the first to cover this ground.
Rogers' 1995 novel, Promised Lands, which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book award in Britain, is also based on the life of the amateur scientist and astronomer Dawes.
In an email to a Canberra acquaintance which was forwarded to The Canberra Times, Rogers said Grenville ''has based her novel on exactly the research that I did for Promised Lands, although she seems to imply that hers is the first novel ever to cover this ground''.
''I am happy for the story of William Dawes to be used and re-used; history is fair game for all novelists. But I'm not happy with the suggestion that this is original material, in a novel!''
There is no suggestion of plagiarism: although the novels draw on similar historical sources, they take a very different approach.
Grenville said yesterday she would not want Rogers to feel that she had dismissed another writer's work and would contact her to make sure there were no misunderstandings.
Grenville said she was aware of Rogers' novel and had glanced through it to be sure that Rogers hadn't already done what she planned to do.
She said that she had not wanted to read Rogers' book at that stage ''because I knew that would cloud my own ability to imagine it afresh''.
''I don't think it uses the notebooks and the actual conversations to the extent The Lieutenant does, but I certainly spoke hastily if I said it was ... the only novel that mentioned William Dawes.''
In recent interviews, Grenville has noted that she came across the story of William Dawes while researching her previous novel, The Secret River.
What first brought Dawes to her attention was her discovery of the journals Dawes kept which recorded an Aboriginal language, she said.
What also attracted her as a novelist was the relationship Dawes developed with a young Aboriginal girl, Patyegarang.
On her website she says, ''When I came across the germ of this story in historical sources, I knew I had to try to tell it: I wanted others to feel the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck excitement I was feeling about these two people and what happened to them.''
Grenville is no stranger to controversy. The enormously successful The Secret River brought a stinging attack from historian Inga Clendinnen for promoting the view that one could ''get inside the experience'' of historical figures and that the novel was a work of history.
Grenville has been at pains in recent interviews to make it clear that The Lieutenant ''is not history'', preferring to refer to the book as a novel about ''the past''.
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