I am pleased to present a writer from France that I found on WordPress! I wrote a brief review for her short story titled ‘Enders.’ She’s an amazing writer based upon this alone, but she is much, much more.

My brief interview:

1. You have a family and pets; how many children and what are their ages? Any quirky or fun facts, please share. How many and which types of pets?

I have five children. The eldest is twenty-five, the youngest just turned fourteen. I’m sorry but if I gave out any fun facts about them my life wouldn’t be worth living! The number of pets is debatable. There are three residents, a rescue Spanish greyhound and two cats picked up (literally) in the street outside. Branwell is semi-resident, refusing to move in unless the dog goes. I’m not sure how many roof cats we feed as many of them look pretty similar. They are known generically as The Fluffies.

2. Please tell us about the transition from England to France, how you coped, language problems, etc. Are women different in these two countries?

My parents moved to England when I was a baby, and I claim honorary Yorkshire nationality. My first job when I left university was in the wine trade. Husband (to be), who was still a student in France thought it was a brilliant idea, assuming it would be a doddle to get posted to France. It wasn’t a doddle, partly because the wine trade in UK is about selling wine to people in UK, not swanning around in foreign parts. I did get sent to Paris after about a year of pestering by bluffing my way through an interview. The head of the Paris office was so thrilled at the opportunity to show off his English, the interview to test my level of French was carried out exclusively in English!

The language turned out not to be a problem although my French was pretty rudimentary to begin with. The ‘total immersion’ treatment is the only way to get the hang of a language properly and quickly.

I’m not sure what you mean about French women being different. French society is certainly very different to British society, much more deferential and ‘traditional’ in many ways. What first struck me about French women was how feminine they appeared. I arrived with my Doc Martens and army surplus bought at Camden Lock and found myself surrounded by women, even elderly women bustling around in high heels, glitzy outfits and a lot of makeup. It made me smarten up my act when we lived in Paris, but I’m old enough now not to care what people think of the way I dress, and the Doc Martens are back.

3. I’ve read one short story of yours, are all your books in the same genre filled with angst, desolation and emotional tugs?

They are certainly all emotionally charged, though with the desolation I think we touched bottom in The Subtle Fiend. I like emotion and if it’s missing in a book that I’m reading I don’t enjoy it. The Green Woman series is about the defeat of a regime that embodies many of the things I find abhorrent—misogyny, segregation, intolerance, religious fascism, and social tyranny. It was never going to be a bundle of laughs. The series that picks up the story three years later, set in the utopia founded by the refugees from Providence, is lighter in tone. Perhaps because the story is about defending something good rather than destroying something evil, and the villains are for the most part human beings, flawed like all human beings, but never wholly bad.

If you want to get an idea of the world of The Green Woman you can’t do better than read the first volume of the trilogy, The Dark Citadel. But if a whole novel written by an unknown quantity seems daunting, try a short story like Midnight Visitors to get a feel of what Providence is like and of my writing style.

Here’s the trailer for The Dark Citadel

In grim grey Providence Deborah dreams
Subversive dreams of a beauty lost.
To feed their darkness the Demon’s priests
Must quench Deborah’s light, her life the cost.

Jonah is waiting in the desert wastes
To take her hand and guide her through
Abaddon’s perils that lurk in the night
To the Green Woman’s Garden where dreams come true.

They march with an army of legends and myths
In their hearts a weapon the Demon fears.
Armed with their love they can change the world
Though the road to victory be bathed in tears.

by Jane Dougherty

Thank you for visiting the gardenlilie blog. Hopefully, you learned something about Jane Dougherty and caught a glimpse of her riveting written words. I know I learned the phrase Raison d’etre, which means reason for existence in French, when I read her Enders story. Below are the links for her books on Amazon.

~Caroline/gardenlilie blog

The Amazon links

http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Citadel-Green-Woman-Book-ebook/dp/B00JW86TYM

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Dark-Citadel-Green-Woman-ebook/dp/B00JW86TYM

And links for Midnight Visitors
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Midnight-Visitors-Jane-Dougherty-ebook/dp/B00K8DYOC4

http://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Visitors-Jane-Dougherty-ebook/dp/B00K8DYOC4