The last time Emma Donoghue wrote a book, her mother was murdered by a meat cleaver-wielding maid. Fortunately for all concerned, the incident took place within the confines of her historical novel, Slammerkin. Donoghue based the character of Mrs Jones on her mother and hoped no one would notice. So what happened when the book was published?

"My mother guessed immediately," Donoghue laughs. "But she had no objections. Whatever leads to literature is all right by her.

"I don't think I was trying to kill my mother. A therapist might disagree, but I think I was being very pragmatic and plucking from my family a model for someone who would be extremely warm and who just might end up getting murdered. You're prioritising the story and the characters. You're not trying to punish your old enemies and reward your old friends."

Given her mother's placid reaction, it is easy to believe Donoghue. It is also easy to like her. The 32-year-old, Dublin-born author has an easy, warm laugh and a kind manner. Despite the fact that she is suffering from a terrible cold, she talks at length and with passion about her work.

Donoghue's mother is far from the only real person to become tangled up in her prose. The author operates like a magpie, spying out precious gems from reality and weaving them into her fiction.

In her new short story collection, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits, she re-creates eminent figures such as the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and art critic John Ruskin. She also gives space to lesser-known individuals such as the bunny woman of her excellent title, and another female character who founded a cult.

Donoghue began work on the collection in 1992, sneaking away from her other fiction and academic work to do research into the lives of her subjects. Despite her rigour, she is painfully aware that she cannot find out everything about her characters -- and very grateful that she may only have to placate their ghosts.

"It would trouble me a lot more if they were more recently dead," she says. "Someone like Eoin McNamee [author of The Blue Tango] must feel that he's really treading on the sensibilities of people who are still alive. In this collection, these people are so long dead and, in most cases, so forgotten, that I feel that telling their stories is doing their ghosts a benefit."

Some of the best stories in the collection centre on female characters who have repressed sexual desires for other women. Donoghue writes with tenderness, but never sentimentality, about these individuals. There is a sorrow here for their enforced celibacy and also a kind of angry despair.

Throughout the book, the focus is firmly on the intellectual rather than the physical feelings of her characters. Was this because Donoghue was fearful of writing about sex?

"I've no objection to sex scenes when they come up," she says. "But in this collection, the people I was writing about were very much dominated by the mind rather than the body. For me, it really depends on the subject matter."

Donoghue has some pointers, too, on how exactly sex scenes should be written.

"There are some enormous clichés in lesbian sex writing," she says. "There are far too many scenes out there in which tendrils of seaweed go washing around. So I would personally hope to avoid seaweed imagery for the rest of my life."

There is laughter in Donoghue's voice, but also a note of wariness. Donoghue remains one of a very small number of openly gay Irish writers -- and, to some extent, everything she has ever done has been overshadowed by this fact. This is something of which she is very aware.

"When Stirfry [Donoghue's first novel] was coming out, there were a lot more interviews, especially in Ireland, that were all about my sex life and not at all about the book," she says. "So I found the beginning of my career the toughest in terms of publicity. And that has definitely eased off. Everything about my career has got easier over the past few years."

It may well have helped that Donoghue moved to Canada in 1998 to be with her partner, Christine. Although she makes light of it, many of her experiences as a lesbian in Dublin were less than pleasant. She was spat at in the "genteel surroundings of Merrion Square" and occasionally kicked out of pubs.

It was the little things that bothered her most, though. The fear of telling her friends and family, coupled with the worry that she would be removed from school or sent to a priest, had a profound effect on her.

She summoned up the courage to tell her mother only after she had graduated in English and French from UCD, and won a scholarship to Cambridge to do a doctorate.

In England, her life became much easier. With the grant she received from college, she was able to spend large amounts of time working on her fiction. Three years into the course, she won her first book contract, and Stirfry was published to great acclaim in 1994.

Donoghue says she does not regret that she didn't wind up working as a university lecturer like her father, Denis Donoghue. He was thrilled when she became a writer, she adds, although he did worry that she might end up starving in a rat-infested garret somewhere.

These days, the pair often discuss literature, but Emma has made a decision never to show him her work before it is published.

"It's not fair to put him in the position of having to be the doting father and the critic," she says. "I think it would make him implode."

Has he ever considered writing a critical analysis of her work? She shudders. "What a thought! That would keep me awake at night."

Donoghue is currently working on two novels. One is set in Ireland and Canada, while the other reaches back into 18th century London.

"Why would you always write about your own era when you could write about any era? It doesn't even feel like the past is a specific place apart from me. It's more like you know that all of time is open to writers."

And so far, Emma Donoghue is making excellent use of it.