Volatile, fair and loyal personality who organises poetry readings in a Cork Street gallery and is the wife of ad man Maurice Saatchi. Versatile and competitive producer of high-brow plays. Entertaining and high-voltage career woman with supercharged emotions who was formerly on the board of Haymarket Publishing.

Such is the reputation of Josephine Hart, author of Damage, a novel about a middle-aged man’s (requited) erotic obsession with his son’s fiancee. Hart is dressed in black leggings, black Paco Rabanne mid-thigh jacket and flat black shoes, looking expensive, elegant and understated. ‘I break out sometimes and buy red or occasionally green. But I have a strong reaction to colour. If I wear red too much, I get too excitable.’ Black soothes and controls her, making her feel calm. ‘You can fade away in black in a way you can’t with other colours.’

She carries a horse-nosebag handbag, black of course, which contains a thumb-sized book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘Poetry is an absolute necessity in my life. I read it certainly every day,’ she says later, in her very Irish accent. ‘I need it, really need it. I would be bereft without it.’ She’s also wearing a gold ring that looks like the Sydney Opera House, with a diamond in each roof, plus three strands of grey Chanel beads. She has rich brown hair, sharp eyes, thin lips and a strong, determined face. ‘I think I’m fairly fit’ – she swims most days – ‘I move everywhere very fast. If it were possible I’d run, but it looks too embarrassing in the street.’

She wears little make-up save beetroot lipstick. So what of her face? ‘I think it’s a big face (means big features) – but not a pretty face, and not a fashionable one. I think it looks strong and open. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m terribly open.’

She feels very Irish. ‘Yeats says, ‘I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart’. There’s tremendous intensity that comes from being Irish and a passion for words.’ She waxes eloquently and lengthily on the subject, very Irishly.

Here is a formidable woman who lingers in the mind long after the meeting, possibly because her words seem so wise. She comes across as persistent, single-minded and with an iron will: a survivor; and an intense, complex and deep character who appears terribly tough on the surface. She also has an elegant mind – is passionately literary, erudite and interesting – and shows her convent education in a high-mindedness, impetus to self-improvement and moral rectitude.

‘It’s terribly difficult to know yourself,’ she says, putting her hand on her chin in a gesture of self-comfort. ‘It’s a very difficult journey between the necessity of finding out who you are because it’s crucial in your relationships with other people, and self-obsession.

‘All my responsibility in life, I believed, was to behave correctly, fulfil my duty and save my soul.’ Has she managed that to date? ‘I think I’m very dutiful.’

She has spent years trying to work herself out, trying to decide when to lay ghosts to rest. ‘I wouldn’t say that finally living in the here and now is something that I have fully managed to do.’

Her 16-year-old brother and nine-year-old sister died within months of each other when she was 17 – one from illness and the other in an accident. She lived in an extremely enclosed world (‘I never went anywhere. For me to go to Dublin was a major thing’) and handled the pain in a very intense way while her parents ‘almost died of grief’. ‘I feel I have lived two such different lives and integrating them both is very difficult.’ Does she feel like two different people? ‘To some extent.’

She once stopped training to be an actress because she felt she had to delve into herself too much. ‘It requires such psychological courage and I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that. I know I would have cracked up.’ Is she damaged? ‘I am full of sadness, definitely. The life was certainly damaged. But I don’t know whether my soul was damaged beyond repair. I don’t think so because a lot of extraordinary insights came out of it.’

What goes on in her soul? ‘The same as that which should go on in anybody’s soul. The question of how you live a good life.’ She joins her hands together and rests her chin on them, looking as if she is praying. Materially, she lives a good life. Her father ran a garage, while M, as she calls her husband, is not short of a bob or two. ‘That has been the most irrelevant thing in the world to me. It’s hard to describe the emphasis on the spiritual that I grew up with. The things that were interesting were poetry and how well read you were, not whether you had a car.’ In Damage, the narrator is a man. How easy was it for her to be a man? ‘Hideously easy,’ she laughs, an infectious laugh that hits the ceiling. ‘I was so shocked. I felt in total symbiosis with him – and what that says about me as a woman, I really don’t know.’

She views her sexuality – and she’s paraphrasing Tom Stoppard in the Real Thing here – as the great unplayed card. ‘In every other area of your life, people can see how you are, see your clothes, listen to what you say. But a person’s sexual nature, their behaviour in sexual matters, is the great secret of people’s psychology. An extraordinary thing . . . the power of sex . . . it’s majesty . . .’ she says. ‘It has a terrifying ability to throw us out of synch in relation to everything else . . . It is an intense experience . . . I really feel it is an extraordinary, the most extraordinary event in life.’

So how would she describe herself? ‘I have a very disciplined surface and underneath a reasonably cheerful nature. The two are integrating more now.’ She talks in an emphatic way, cutting the air with her voice and speaking aggressively with her hands as if she were chopping meat in the air. ‘I’m emotional, passionate (she gobbles the word as if she doesn’t want to say it out loud). I think I’m fair. When I examine my behaviour every day, I ask myself whether I’ve been fair.

‘It’s terribly easy to be harsh towards others and soft to oneself. And it’s easy for me to be incredibly loving, just as it is easy for me to go pow (she punches her palm with her fist) phew like that when I am angry. My nature is one that would go like that whack (she hits her hand) if I let it.’

It was said that she often bred fear rather than affection in her colleagues. ‘That was a long time ago. I was terribly upset when I read that. But I think it was probably true.’ She thinks perhaps people found her persistence, forthright opinions and intense concentration disturbing. She does come over as very hard. ‘I can accept that. I can completely sympathise with someone who doesn’t know me thinking, ‘God, what’s going to stop this person?’ ‘ she says, her face visibly softening for the first time.

‘I have a determination based on having to decide to survive, not financially but psychologically. But I don’t think I’m hard at all, not at all. I wish I were much tougher. People I love can do absolutely anything with me. My children complain that I’m too soft.’