The new book picks up where her last novel left off

Anne Doughty is clear about the role of fiction in that it must stimulate as well as entertain. ‘At the end of a book you should know something better than you did before. You should know something of yourself better than you did before.’
On December 31, 2005 Severn House will publish The Hawthorns Bloom in May, the next instalment in Doughty’s series.When this series is completed, she will have followed the lives of an Ulster family from 1861 to 1961. Such an undertaking requires a great deal of research and she is no stranger to the libraries and archives of Northern Ireland.
Despite being born and raised in the province, ironically it was whilst in England that her education into the history of Northern Ireland became well-developed. Married to a historian she began on a self-imposed programme of education to ‘remedy her ignorance of her own country.’A dedicated attention to detail is evident in all of her books which can be read as much for their coverage of social history as the characters whose lives are thus affected. Major historical events are covered such as the sinking of the Titanic and the Armagh Rail Disaster of 1889, which claimed 88 lives and was at the time the worst in Europe.During this period Doughty reflected a great deal on her home in the Armagh countryside which only served to increase her affection for the place. For Doughty success in her work is very simple: ‘If I can do one small thing, it’s to show people there is a lot of good here.’
And the message is getting across. Doughty has fans as far away as North America and Australia, many of whom have Irish roots and suffer from what the author calls a ‘longing for a certain contact with Ireland’. Her work has also been translated into French and German for those foreign markets. However, it is at home that she has had the greatest impact.In 2004, there were 60,000 readers of Doughty’s books in UK libraries. While there are no such figures for borrowing in the US, she has heard of American tourists asking for her work by name in bookshops here, enviable success for someone who had never intended to be an author.
A geographer by training, it was after a project with her husband, Peter Doughty, that she began taking writing more seriously. ‘I was writing as a little girl but assumed it was something you grew out of,’ she said.‘When my husband and I married we were both teachers and worked on a series of educational books. When we finished the project I was desolate with no book to write and my husband convinced me to write a novel. I was sure I would never write fifty thousand words, which was the standard for a short novel, but in the end it was one hundred and fifty thousand words.’
As well as being a passionate fan of both JK Rowling and JRR Tolkein she also enjoys the works of Alexander McCall Smith and Jane Austen. Such authors are not only many years apart but also very different in content. Or not, it seems to Anne Doughty.She appreciates the grandiose fantasy of Tolkein and Rowling exploring the big themes of good versus evil in their sprawling invented worlds. She sees similar traits in Austen and McCall Smith who present our world as they see it. There is a power in the detail of the everyday that can often say a great deal. Employing her imagination to write about a past foreign to her, there still needs to be that connection with the characters for the story to work. ‘At the beginning I was educating, it’s the teacher in me, but then I caught myself on. The story needs to carry the weight of the message.
A friend who works in Armagh always thinks of the books when travelling in the area. He looks around for fragments of the world in the books.’Doughty is currently researching the 1920s for her next novel but is undaunted by the task. ‘I have the characters and, as my husband says, in my books it is they who drive the story.’ With an intimate knowledge of characters that she has developed over a number of years there are clear parallels with the authors mentioned above.With the fruits of her dedicated research into the history of Ulster and these well-developed characters that everyone can relate to, there is clearly a lot for the reader to learn in the works of Anne Doughty.
The Hawthorns Bloom in May is available in hardback from December 31 and the paperback edition will be produced by Blackstaff Press in May 2006. The other two books in the series are The Woman from Kerry and The Hamiltons of Ballydown.

Frazer Orr

source - Culture Northern Ireland