Morton writes popular historical fiction: old-fashioned page-turners about mysterious houses, long-held secrets, foundlings – think Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca crossed with Dickens at his ripping-yarn Victorian best.

First there was The House at Riverton (published in the UK and the US as The Shifting Fog), which immediately became a New York Times bestseller (most US publishers have clauses in their contracts giving any author an automatic $US50,000 cash bonus for making that hallowed list). The Shifting Fog went on to the No. 1 spot on the Sunday Times Bestsellers chart, and then won the 2007 Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year (awarded by an influential UK book show, since ended). In Australia, it won the 2007 Australian Book Industry Award.

Morton, 42, also happens to be breathtakingly beautiful, which makes her life appear superlatively blessed. A journalist from Spain’s El País newspaper fell over himself trying to describe her: “ … thin with milky skin, smooth chestnut hair with golden highlights and a fringe that is repositioned all the time with a single finger … perfect mouth and a direct look that addresses you frankly”. She also has a handsome musician husband, Davin Patterson, who she’s mad about – and who is mad about her – and three adorable sons. She’s like some ­enchanted princess showered with impossibly good fortune.

Except, as in many fairytales, there are dark shadows threatening the beauty’s light. In ­Morton’s case, they take the form of her former literary agent, NSW-based Selwa Anthony, who has engaged her in a long-running court case. Anthony is suing Morton for breach of contract, claiming that even though Morton sacked her as her agent in 2015, Anthony is still entitled to 15 per cent commission on all monies earned by Morton for the life of the works for which Anthony ­negotiated the contracts.

In a counterclaim, Morton’s counsel argues that her ­former agent deprived her of opportunities as a new author and Morton is seeking a refund of up to $2.8 million already paid to Anthony in commissions. At the time of going to press, the case in the NSW Supreme Court before Justice Julie Ward, which started in mid-August, was still running.

Then there’s another Brisbane-based author, Kim ­Wilkins, described in court as a “former friend” by Morton. It was Wilkins, an already published author, who introduced Morton to Anthony. Wilkins sent her one of ­Morton’s manuscripts on her friend’s behalf, which ­Anthony declared unpublishable, but nonetheless encouraged Morton to send her any further new work.

Morton and her husband had to fly in from London, where she is now based, to appear at the Sydney court ­hearing last month. While unable to comment on the case, Morton admits to Qweekend that the whole thing has dragged on for more than two-and-a-half years and that it’s “not pleasant, but if someone ­decides to sue you, you don’t have much choice other than to ­defend yourself”. As for Wilkins, “we don’t really see each other”, Morton says. ­Clearly, the author’s troubles are not her favourite subject.

“I’m just a person who writes books, really. That’s it,” she says. But there aren’t many people who write books who turn out to have the fairytale success of Kate Morton.

THE LONDON CONNECTION

Morton is the first of three daughters born to civil ­engineer Warren Morton, now 68, and his then-wife, Diane, 67. “I’m a classic firstborn, I’m afraid,” she says. “I tick all the boxes.” Little Kate was studious, well-behaved, “that sort of person” who does everything she is expected to do.

Because of her father’s work projects, the family moved between South Australia, NSW and Queensland, finally settling on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast hinterland when Morton was five. She went to small local state schools before attending Somerset College at Mudgeeraba.

Morton was a bookish child, a lover of Enid Blyton, smugglers’ coves, stories with “lashings of lemonade” and all things British. Later, it was the Bronte sisters, Dickens, du Maurier and Nancy Mitford. She has been enchanted by the idea of Britain’s moors and its country houses, conkers, hedgerows, and its stratified society for most of her life.

Her love of England and its history can be traced to a childhood spent holed up reading, dreaming of snow and roaring fires in an old English house with a secret. She’s written that as soon as she arrived in England for the first time, aged 17, she immediately felt at home.

The three Morton sisters – Kate, artist Jenny, 39, and bestselling Mills & Boon author Julia, 36, who writes under a nom de plume – were romantic girls, given to dreaming. Julia imagined the three of them were like the Bronte ­sisters, without their early deaths. “Julia’s a force of nature, she’s incredible,” says Morton. “She started writing when she was 14 but was only published about four years ago. Now she’s hugely successful.”

Possibly not as hugely successful as her sister Kate, but if there is any sibling rivalry among the Morton sisters, it is nowhere visible. The sisters are close (after her court ­appearance Morton travelled to Adelaide, where both ­sisters and her mother now live). Warren and Diane ­Morton separated when their daughters were adults and ­Warren Morton continues to run a civil engineering ­practice at Southport on the Gold Coast.

Morton’s own longstanding marriage to musician and composer Patterson, whom she met at a gig where he was playing when she was 18 and he was studying jazz piano at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, is clearly ­sustaining to her creative practice. She has no intention of letting him go. “He’s a very, very special human, my ­greatest gift,” she says. “I feel blessed in many ways but ­especially about him. He came into my family when I was 18 and he became like one of the children of our family. My ­sisters – everyone – adore him.”

In creative partnerships there is often tension when one half achieves more success than the other, but not so in their marriage. “We’ve been together 24 years, we’re best friends, [jealousy or rivalry] has never been an issue.”

It helps that Patterson tends to concentrate on small, boutique projects: he composed the score for the Museum of Brisbane’s successful 2013 show The River, and was ­nominated for an AFI Award for Best Sound in 2005, but Morton is the family’s primary breadwinner. She’s written about how their early life together was often hand-to-mouth. Now their three children (Oliver, 15, Louis, 10, and Henry, 4) are at a posh independent school near their home in Hampstead in North London. The family has let their Paddington house in inner-west Brisbane (they also own a property at Mt Tamborine where Morton sometimes goes to write) and are renting in London, in a house with a tiny courtyard only “big enough to fit a Weber”.

The first thing Morton did when she and her husband discussed moving to London was to consider their children – schools, and where they would live. “I pinpointed the schools my boys would fit best,” says Morton, who stresses that even though they now attend an independent “prep” school, “it’s pretty progressive”. The kids love it, even though the older two sometimes tease baby Henry about his English accent.

The family is into the third year of their five-year visa. Morton says she knew they needed to be near open space, which is why they chose an area close to Hampstead Heath. “They’re Australian kids, used to getting out on their bikes, running around and being noisy. I think they’re the three noisiest children in London.” They intend to move back to Australia. “I love London, but I love Brisbane as well, it’s not a comparative thing,” Morton says. “Our extended family is [in Australia], but at the moment being in the UK is really useful for research and a great opportunity that I’m glad to have, so we’re on something of a family adventure.”

RIGHT PLACE, NEXT TITLE

Morton’s new novel is firmly based in England and is possibly her most “English” novel yet. It features characters with names straight out of Dickens (“Pale Joe” might have wandered in from David Copperfield or Great Expectations), and ranges from Victorian England and a group of artists resembling the Pre-Raphaelites, to the Blitz of World War II and modern-day London. Told in multiple voices across time, it starts with the well-used ­device of someone discovering something from the past, in this case a young archivist finding a 150-year-old leather satchel with a photograph and an artist’s sketchbook inside.

The book was inspired by her love of London; Morton finds the city “invigorating”. “The very streets are resources for books like mine, and to have the level of resources, the British Library, the London Library, is just incredible,” she says. “Obviously the big museums inspire me but it’s not just the big ones; the little ones, the niche museums, are amazing too. The Dickens Museum! To be able to walk into the actual house where Dickens lived is extraordinary.”

London has been a magnet for Morton ever since she studied for her Licentiate in Speech and Drama at Trinity College and did a summer Shakespeare course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She originally thought she might become an actor, but her love of books – which led ­directly to writing – won out. “It was more a love of words and storytelling than performance,” she says.

Morton completed her BA (Hons) at the University of Queensland in 1999, majoring in English, and gained a ­Masters (also from UQ) in 2002, for a thesis on the work of Thomas Hardy. But Morton’s true subject is time: its effects on character, and on the way the present vanishes into the unrecoverable past. Her Anglophile mother’s love of ­antiques was inherited by her eldest daughter so that anything old – jewellery, houses, clothing – sets Morton’s imagination alight. As a child she spent a lot of time with her mother snooping around old shops and secondhand book stores.

Her longtime Australian publisher, Annette Barlow at Allen & Unwin, says she is privileged to be Morton’s first reader. “Kate’s ability to create the environment of her ­novels is extraordinary. These places live and breathe in her readers’ consciousness,” says Barlow, who adds that no one should forget that Morton also writes “a first-rate mystery”.

As for Morton herself, she wants nothing more than to keep writing books. She seeks to inspire in her readers the same sort of feeling she got as a child, falling down the ­rabbit hole into the wonder of a book. For her, the world is one great treasure chest of objects: old brooches, faded sepia photographs, the myriad stories people keep close to their hearts. She’s not on Twitter, and her Instagram account is not filled with an endless string of selfies, but rather with photographs of letterboxes or old houses or a falling-down iron gate.

“Oh yeah, I’m a girl out of time in that respect,” she says, laughing. Her millions of readers love her for it. ■

The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton (Allen & Unwin, $33), published September 12