The Four Swans

Welcome to Jane Dougherty’s website. This where you can read about my publications, and where I will continue to post short fiction and poetry.

Why The Four Swans? Because the legend of Lir’s four children, turned into swans and cursed to wander the length and breadth of Ireland for nine hundred years, was the first that captured my childhood imagination. And for the House of the Four Swans in one of my favourite childhood stories, The Grey Goose of Kilnevin by Patricia Lynch.

My stories come from the borderlands between myth, magic and a history that might have been. I write them in a very old farmworker’s cottage, in the middle of meadows, in an unfashionable part of southwest France.

The latest of these stories, Pasiphaë is published by Legend Press. It is a re-imagining of the myth of Pasiphaë and the Minotaur, setting it in an historical context, a history that might have been.