Deborah Moggach is a novelist and screenwriter whose most recent work is the adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Edel Brosnan talked with her by candlelight in her Georgian home.

Adapting a novel for the big screen is a risky business for a writer: get it wrong and you face the wrath of the original book's fans. Deborah Moggach penned the script for 2005's acclaimed film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. She has also dramatised many of her own books, and is the author of fifteen novels and two collections of short stories. Her best-known novel, Tulip Fever, was optioned by DreamWords at proof stage, and is set to go into production in the near future.

Moggach grew up surrounded by writers: her father, Richard Hough, wrote over a hundred books, including one that was made into a film, The Bounty (1984), starring Mel Gibson; her mother wrote and illustrated children's books. But, not wanting to emulate her parents, Deborah trained as a teacher, and worked in publishing. Then, in her mid 20s, she got married and moved to Pakistan for two years. She worked as a journalist, and returned to London with a half-finished novel in her suitcase.

Her first novel You Must Be Sisters, published in 1980, is semi-autobiographical, as is her second book Close to Home. Thereafter she found ideas elsewhere: a fleeting glimpse of pigs being loaded onto a lorry inspired one book; her latest novel grew out of anger at the plight of pensioners in the UK.

I met Deborah last September at her home in north London, shortly after Pride and Prejudice opened in the UK. A power cut had plunged her Georgian home into darkness, creating a suitably 19th-century ambience. We drank tea brewed on the kitchen range, and talked by candlelight about a writing career that has taken her from Hampstead to Hollywood.

Edel: So, did living abroad help you get started as a writer?

Deborah: Yes, when you are starting to write it's hugely liberating to go away, because you don't feel inhibited. You're very free. You don't think: 'what would my mother think of what I'm writing?'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.