Bernadette Brennan

speaker

419 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2018 last heard 29 May

Bernadette Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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The Bookshelf · Beejay Silcox & Bernadette Brennan review: Doireann Ní Ghríofa/Chloe Wilson/Deborah Levy · 29 May 2026 podcast

And what the narrator discovers is that she opens up this world and this world enters her physically and psychologically.

The pages, some of them crumble in her fingers, but she has this fantastic line where she says, I am a vessel.

I become a vessel for these

These words that I'm reading, they come into me.

They come into my body, into my soul.

And it's my responsibility to respect them and to tell them back to you.

And that's how she says, I need to name them.

But then there's the historical and ethical issues of you can't name these people.

So she compromises and speaks to the archivist and says, can I give them their first names?

But that also causes her a bit of an issue because then she becomes obsessed and thinks, if I stop once I've started reading these women, these voices, then I am silencing them again.

So how is she going to end?

And anyone who has experienced archive fever, as you and I have, is how do we leave the archive?

We get all of our information and then how do we tell this story to share it with the

That is what this character is dealing with all the way through this book.

I'm going to stick more with the haunting rather than the ghosts.

I'd say haunting is a really positive thing.

It's not some eerie, scary thing.

To really care about your subject that you've discovered, especially in an archive, I

I think, is to be ethically engaged with that subject.

What this book is saying is these women are not dead.

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