But, like many of us these days, it's a largely internal, workaday thing, existing inside us alongside the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life.

And so, for the moment at least, the television writer, playwright and novelist has parlayed her rage into fiction.

Her latest novel, The Family Doctor, is about women's fury, and the places it can take you when trauma, grief and children are involved.

Paula is a suburban GP - a good, kind and caring one - who returns home one afternoon to a scene of horror.

Her friend Stacey, and Stacey's two children, who have been staying with Paula, have been shot dead by their estranged father and husband.

Paula missed the signs and couldn't protect them. She's tormented by how she could have failed to protect them. She finds herself fixated on the idea that there might be other women she could protect before it's too late. And the scene is set.

Fiction, says Oswald, is a nice change from television; she was the creator and head writer of hit TV series Offspring from 2010-2013, and The Family Doctor is her third novel since then.

"After I finished Offspring, I was really fired up to write, my creative flywheel was spinning for half the night," she says.

"There's something so satisfying about a novel where you could just run with an idea. You're not answering to anybody, at least in the beginning, in the way that you are with television where there's lots of people you need to kind of liaise with, whereas with a novel I can just think, I've got this idea, I'm going to give it a try."

We're talking on the day after the Walk 4 Justice, an event that both of us watched closely, but neither of us attended. Her excuse is better than mine - she was busy promoting her book.

It's a book that speaks squarely to the issues at play for many women today. It deals with domestic violence and police procedure, but also female friendship, work, ageing, sex and love.

But at the centre of it is a terrifying moral dilemma: how far would any of us go to protect someone if we thought they were in danger? If we had a patient we knew was being abused by her husband, and we saw an opportunity to stop said husband, for good, from doing it again?

But this is not, Oswald says, a story of revenge.

"I want it to be a kind of transgressive daydream, so that a reader can follow the story and think, yes, without endorsing what Paula does," she says.

"But you can still feel the satisfaction of that sort of dark satisfaction for a moment.

"I've never written thrillers as such, this is the first time I've ever written something with a kind of suspenseful drive.

"But then again in television, and in theatre and in other novels, you're always trying to think how am I going to keep the audience hooked, so they're going to want to keep finding out what happens next to these people.

"So it's a thriller in the sense of suspense, but it's not a puzzle, it's not a mystery to be solved. I hope that I hold people because they care about these two women, and they want to find out what happens next, rather than you're piecing together a puzzle."

That said, Oswald likes to remind people that she has form when it comes to killing people off in fiction.

She's still reviled - for want of a better word - for doing away with a central Offspring character at a pivotal moment. That was a car accident - she's also done natural causes, as well as the odd bit of violence.

But, she says, she's never dabbled in murder as a central narrative.

"People might not think it's obvious territory for me but actually... I've got a long-time obsession with the urge to keep people safe and how far you will go to do that," she says.

"So it seems unlikely, but it actually absolutely makes sense that [murder] will be the next thing.

And also, you know, I'm old. I'm angry, I've had it, you know, so I'm going to rage in fiction if I feel like it."

And the storyline is far from straightforward when it comes to right and wrong, immoral or justified, ethical or beyond the pale.

Her central character is someone who believes herself to be a moral person, but her actions, out of context, say otherwise.

"I didn't want Paula to be a Dexter kind of psychopath," Oswald says.

"I didn't want it to be an unrealistic kind of character, I wanted her to be you or me, who in a very particular circumstance has crossed the line.

"And when that happens, I wanted to imagine, how would I feel if I've done what Paula does. I would be sick with anxiety, I would be, you know, churned up with remorse. I would feel like a terrible person.

"Nothing happens to her and effectively, it's a tragedy about her life unravelling. Because of what she's done."

The book's setting might also seem familiar - a man killing his wife and kids, and then himself.

But Oswald says she didn't have any particular case in mind when she devised the plot.

In fact, she wanted the opening, horrifying scene to be just one part of a much larger, more complex whole.

"The truth is, it could be any one of a number of cases and I started researching how I was going to write this book," she says.

"There's no shortage of material, no shortage of stories that everyone knows about. I think it's almost better not to specify a particular case. That can be reductive in a way.

"My sister's a GP, and I think that was part of the sort of little imaginative kernel because I thought, imagine if your job every day is looking after these little kids, and you know a little kid is going home to a dangerous household.

"It must happen all the time and so, although I wanted to write about rage, I also wanted to weld that to other beautiful things in the world, like the urge to protect vulnerable people, and female friendship."

The Family Doctor also contains a love story - one filled with hope and happiness - which Oswald thinks is important to feature in any portrayal of real life.

She herself has been in a 40-year relationship with author and broadcaster Richard Glover, and says there's something to be said for including good men wherever possible, even in stories about bad ones.

And besides, monsters come less readily to her than "regular decent messed-up people stumbling around trying to do the right thing".

But ultimately, this is a book for our times. Female rage is currently permeating many parts of public life, and The Family Doctor is a thought experiment that she can play out in fiction, just to see how it feels, just as her readers can now try it for themselves as well.

"I was burning with rage about what's happening to women around the country," she says.

"I thought, I can't write about this from the position of a victim but I can write about it from the point of view of the anguished observer, the traumatised friends of these victims, so that was the position that I took."

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