Bernadette Brennan Bernadette Brennan i(A53903 works by)
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 6 y separately published work icon Leaping into Waterfalls : The Enigmatic Gillian Mears Bernadette Brennan , Crows Nest : Allen and Unwin , 2021 22584811 2021 single work biography

'Leaping into Waterfalls explores the rich, tumultuous life of Gillian Mears, one of Australia's most significant writers of the last forty years.

'Gillian Mears appeared to many to be a shy woman from Grafton, but her lived and imaginative lives were rich with adventure, risk and often transgressive passion. In her award-winning and acclaimed novels and short stories, Mears wrote fearlessly of the dark undercurrents of country and family life, always probing the depths and complexity of human desire.

'Mears' sensuality and sexuality were the driving forces of her life and writing. As an adult, she was plagued by ill health yet remained steadfast in her quest to be independent and free; while recovering from open-heart surgery, she traversed the country alone in a de-commissioned ambulance. By her midforties, multiple sclerosis had confined her to a wheelchair. Undaunted, she continued to write and publish until her death five years later in 2016.

'Mears amassed an extensive collection of diaries, letters, manuscripts, photographs, recordings and ephemera, and deposited it with the Mitchell Library. She was a prolific correspondent with significant figures of the cultural landscape-Gerald Murnane, David Malouf, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley, Helen Garner, Drusilla Modjeska, Kate Grenville and Marr Grounds. This meticulous and moving biography reads Mears' life and work within that broader cultural community to celebrate her truly extraordinary achievements and adventures.' (Publication summary)

1 Living Things : City of Trees by Sophie Cunningham Bernadette Brennan , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , July 2019;

— Review of City of Trees : Essays on Life, Death and the Need for a Forest Sophie Cunningham , 2019 selected work essay autobiography
1 Tim Winton, Helen Garner, Paul Keating, Deng Adut : The Stories behind the Year's Best Biographies Tim Winton , Deng Adut , Bernadette Brennan , Joan Healy , Judith Brett , Troy Bramston , 2018 single work column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 12 July 2018;

'Six authors nominated for the National Biography awards reveal what most surprised them about their subjects.' (Publication abstract)

1 Introduction Bernadette Brennan , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Reading the Landscape : A Celebration of Australian Writing 2018; (p. ix-xiv)
1 Being in the Archive : Affect and Scholarly Distance Bernadette Brennan , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Archives and Manuscripts , vol. 46 no. 1 2018; (p. 3-17)

'Working in the archives of living writers provides exciting possibilities for extended interpersonal research as well as ethical challenges. This article explores the author’s experience of working in Helen Garner’s restricted archives and negotiating the demands of scholarly objectivity with an increasingly felt empathic engagement. The author traces a chronological path through the archives relating to Garner’s three substantial works of non-fiction: The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). She draws attention to some of the ways in which distance and objectivity can be influenced not only by contact with a living writer but also by the space in which the archive is encountered. With a deliberate focus on the lived experience of researching, rather than a scholarly examination of archival theory, the author offers a case study of how the interaction of archives and living subject can shape research and publication.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Brigitta Olubas, Editor, Shirley Hazzard : We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Bernadette Brennan , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;

'Few JASAL readers will be unfamiliar with Brigitta Olubas’s extensive scholarship on Shirley Hazzards life and work. In 2012, Olubas published the monograph Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist. That same year she convened a Hazzard symposium at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Papers from that event were later collected in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (2014). Now, in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, Olubas takes readers on a geographical, political and literary tour of Hazzard’s life and mind.' (Introduction)

1 The Speed of Life : Georgia Blain’s The Museum of Words Bernadette Brennan , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , March 2018;

'Georgia Blain began to write The Museum of Words shortly after undergoing surgery for removal of an aggressive, malignant tumour from the language centre in her brain. The tumour was incurable. Blain knew that, at best, she ‘wouldn’t last more than a couple of years’. She died thirteen months later, in December 2016. The Museum of Words, as its subtitle – ‘a memoir of language, writing, and mortality’ – signals, is less about dying than it is about the beauty, complexity and necessity of language. ‘Language’, Blain insists, ‘is at the core of our being. The way in which we express ourselves is inextricably linked to who we are and how others see us.’ Blain expresses herself with a decided absence of sentimentality or self-pity. Her valedictory memoir is a celebration of the lives of four women, their relationships with each other and with language and writing. It is also a love letter to three of those women, to her life partner Andrew Taylor and to her own writing life.' (Introduction)

1 'The Last Garden' by Eva Hornung Bernadette Brennan , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June-July no. 392 2017;
'The epigraph to the first chapter of Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden speaks of Nebelung, a time of great prosperity, joy, and hope for new life. Over the page, Hornung shatters any sense of well-being with an extraordinary opening sentence: ‘On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.’ The prose just keeps getting better as Hornung counterpoints the consciousness of a man driven to murder and suicide with the heartbreaking innocence of his unknowing adolescent son, Benedict.' (Introduction)
1 Helen Garner on Death and Writing : 'Taking Someone Else's Trauma into the Centre of Me' Bernadette Brennan , 2017 extract autobiography (The Spare Room)
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 17 April 2017;
'In this excerpt from a book about the author’s career, Bernadette Brennan looks at Garner’s bestseller The Spare Room. Was it a novel, a memoir, or both?'
1 8 y separately published work icon A Writing Life : Helen Garner and Her Work Bernadette Brennan , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2017 10604838 2017 single work biography

'Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft.

'But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write herself into her nonfiction, and many of her own experiences help to shape her fiction. But who is the ‘I’ in Helen Garner’s work?

'Bernadette Brennan’s A Writing Life is the first full-length study of Garner’s forty years of work, a literary portrait that maps all of her books against the different stages of her life.

'Brennan has had access to previously unavailable papers in Garner’s archive, and she provides a lively and rigorous reading of the books, journals and correspondence of one of Australia’s most beloved women of letters.' (Publication summary)

1 A Book of Revelations Bernadette Brennan , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Morning Herald , 26 March 2016; (p. 26) The Age , 26 March 2016; (p. 26)

— Review of Mick : A Life of Randolph Stow Suzanne Falkiner , 2016 single work biography

'Bernadette Brennan).With the publication of Suzanne Falkiner's Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow, readers have the opportunity to learn a great deal about one of the greatest Australian writers of the 20th century. Coming in at just under 900 pages, including more than 100 pages of endnotes, Falkiner's biography is a massive scholarly work. After years of exhaustive archival research, international travel and extensive interviews, Falkiner crafts a credible and moving portrait of a brilliant, sensitive, complex man. This biography is a significant contribution to Australian literary studies...' (Bernadette Brennan).

1 Through Country Bernadette Brennan , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 384 2016; (p. 19)

— Review of A Companion to the Works of Kim Scott 2016 anthology criticism
'In 2004 Kim Scott delivered the prestigious Herbert Blaiklock Memorial Lecture to a predominantly academic audience at the University of Sydney. Provocatively, he began by saying that he did not know much about Australian literature; the literature of this country did not reflect his experiences or his sense of identity. It certainly was not the literature of his country. Scott wanted to question and complicate the categories of Australian and indigenous literature. His concern that indigenous literature was considered to be a lesser version, or subset, of our national literature had seemed to be confirmed when he located his novel Benang: From the heart (1999) in a bookshop under 'Australiana'.' (Introduction)
1 How Best to Behave Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 377 2015; (p. 23)

— Review of A Few Days in the Country : And Other Stories Elizabeth Harrower , 2015 selected work short story
1 Living the Question : Drusilla Modjeska's Crafted Life Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 376 2015; (p. 7-8)

— Review of Second Half First Drusilla Modjeska , 2015 single work autobiography
'Twenty-five years ago, Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy reimagined boldly the possibilities for Australian memoir. Modjeska recounts in her new memoir, Second Half First, how in her inaugural appearance at a writers' festival she was on a panel discussing autobiography with two established British writers, Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion. Poppy was written but not yet released. Feeling at a disadvantage following on from such accomplished performers, she rose with conviction to announce that 'here in Australia we were thinking about what biography might mean if we took as our subjects those who are not usually considered "worthy" of "A Life"'. She wondered how the inclusion of something of the biographer's own story might contribute to a deeper understanding of how 'a life became a narrative'. Glendinning patronisingly found the idea 'extraordinary'. 'We're not thinking about that in England,' she said.' (Author's introduction)
1 Questions of Character in the Writing and Reading Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 23 November 2015; (p. 35) The Saturday Age , 21-22 November 2015; (p. 29)

— Review of The Women's Pages Debra Adelaide , 2015 single work novel
1 Return Voyage Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , October 2015;

— Review of Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice Helen Garner , 1998 single work prose autobiography
1 The Missing Novels Debra Adelaide , Bernadette Brennan , Geraldine Brooks , Gregory Day , Ian Donaldson , Anna Funder , Andrea Goldsmith , Rodney Hall , Sonya Hartnett , Gail Jones , Susan Lever , Brian Matthews , Peter Rose , Susan Sheridan , Geordie Williamson , 2015 single work column
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 374 2015; (p. 41-43)
'Early success is no guarantee of a book’s continued availability or circulation. Some major and/or once-fashionable authors recede from public consciousness, and in some cases go out of print. We invited some writers and critics to identity novelists who they feel should be better known.'
1 A Soulful Longing Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , April 2015;

— Review of A Short History of Richard Kline : A Novel Amanda Lohrey , 2015 single work novel
1 Bernadette Brennan Reviews 'One Life' by Kate Grenville Bernadette Brennan , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 370 2015;

— Review of One Life : My Mother's Story Kate Grenville , 2015 single work biography
1 Heriot's Ithaka : Soul, Country and the Possibility of Home in To The Islands Bernadette Brennan , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;
'The final line of Randolph Stow's To the Islands - " 'My soul', he whispered, over the sea-surge, 'my should is a strange country'" - has perplexed and fascinated readers and critics for five decades. In 1975 Leonie Kramer found Stow's final sentence to be misplaced: ‘It belongs – if indeed it belongs at all – not at the end of a novel of this kind, but near the beginning'. At a time when interest in Stow and his work is again on the ascendency, this paper investigates what Heriot might have appreciated his soul to be, before arguing that he could not have spoken those resonant words until the very moment when he is blinded by illumination atop the coastal cliff. Heriot walks into homelessness in a quest for home. Like Cavafy's ideal voyager his journey is long and hard, and only once he discovers his soul can he appreciate he has no home. Only then can he understand the true meaning of the islands.' (Publication abstract)
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