I was named after Jane Austen’s Emma. My dad Denis [the late academic and literary critic] wanted to call me Emily because he had been working on Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte, but my mother Frances didn’t like the idea of Emily. She said, “You’ve also worked on the novel Emma, let’s go for that.”
People – especially in the United States – often ask me questions that I can tell assume I had some kind of very traditional Irish upbringing, that we were storytelling around the turf fire. To be fair, we did have a turf fire, but it was in Mount Merrion in Dublin. It was suburban.
It is hilarious to me, but my red hair also means people assume I am the most authentic of…