1. What inspired your latest book or book series?
I’d just given up on the nth swords and sorcery fantasy that my children had also abandoned and decided I could do better than that. I had an idea, just a single image of a drab classroom full of girls wearing heavy grey veils. One of the girls raised her head and looked out of the window, and I knew her name was Deborah, and that I was going to write the story of what she was looking for through the window and make sure she found it in the end.
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2. Who is your favorite book character of all time? Why?
I’m not very good about choosing favourites of anything, but I’ll go for Emma Bovary as favourite character. Not for herself—she’s pretty vacuous and sad—but for the tremendous portrait she makes. Flaubert really understood the frustration of women in a society that allowed them one aim in life—to make a good marriage—and deprived them of any life of the mind at all. Can I also choose Kay Harker in The Box of Delights and Wart in The Once and Future King? I wanted to be one or other of them for about five years of my childhood. If I were choosing a favourite person though it would have to be Moominmama. She is the kind of mother I wish I was, but I know I will never have her patience, and not in a million years would I be able to make a birchbark boat.
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3. What lessons has writing taught you about life in general?
I’m not sure I’d say writing has taught me about life, more that writing has helped me to sort out what I believe, what I admire, and what I hate. Creating characters to illustrate these qualities and finding the words to describe them has been a good test of what I feel about the things that really matter.
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4. What’s your favorite quote?
Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere’s Fan: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” 
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5. Who would you most like to have a cup of coffee with? (Dead or alive) Explain…
I wouldn’t want to discover that my great heroes were really terribly flawed, so, out of simple curiosity I’d like to get the truth out of the parish priest of Rennes-le-château about the Templars’ treasure. Did he really find it and how, or was it just a hoax?
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6. What is your biggest pet peeve?
I live in a town with very good coverage of cycle tracks and cycle lanes. It makes me murderous when cyclists ride along the pavement and the footpaths. And expect the pedestrians to get out of the way!
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7. Tell us something quirky about you.
I had a Mongolian blue spot when I was born, and I have a simian crease on both hands.
Apart from that I’m quite normal.
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8. Favorite comfort food?
Maccheroni cheese, shepherd’s pie, and a cup of tea, though not necessarily in that order.
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9. Star Wars or Star Trek?
Star Trek definitely.
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10. Sunrises or Sunsets?
Sunrises, I’d like to see them more often!
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Jane Dougherty is a product of the Irish diaspora. She was brought up in Yorkshire and educated in Manchester and 
London then moved to France to work in the wine trade. She spent fourteen years in Paris where she married and had four children, sold lots of wine, studied Irish for a year at Paris’s Irish College, and taught herself Italian. Next move was to Laon in Picardy, a medieval gem of a town set in beautiful countryside, where her fifth child was born. She now lives in Bordeaux with her family, a Spanish greyhound and a posse of cats.
Jane can often be found on her blog
On Facebook
on Twitter @MJDougherty33
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