Bernadette Brennan has published widely in journals such as Southerly, Australian Literary Studies, Life Writing, Antipodes, Textjournal, JASAL, Journal of Australasian Cinema, Australian Humanities Review and The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs. Some of her essays are available here. 

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Romance and reality

A biographer faces withdrawal symptoms as she leaves behind an immense archive.

 

Randolph Stow

'Heriot's Ithaka: Soul, Country and the Possibility of Home in To the Islands', JASAL 14.3 (2014). 

'Words of Water: Reading Otherness in Tourmaline and Oyster', JASAL 3 (2004), 143-157.

Francis Webb

‘Recognizing the “Face of Love” in Francis Webb’s “The Canticle”’, Antipodes 19:1 (2005), 31-41.

‘Death and the Woman: Looking at Francis Webb’s “Lament for St Maria Goretti”’,  Australian Literary Studies 21:3 (2004), 289-298.

'Tracing the Spectre of Death in Francis Webb's Last Poems', JASAL 9 (2009)

Patrick White

'Riders in the Chariot: A Tale for our Times', JASAL 6 (2007), 32-45.

'Worlds Without and Within: Reading Through Patrick White's Library in The Solid Mandala', in Scenes of Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013.

 

Memoirs of Loss and Healing

'Frameworks of Grief: Narrative as an act of healing in contemporary memoir'. Maggie MacKellar's When It Rains and Virginia Lloyd's The Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement. Text Journal 16.1 (April 2012)

'Alone and in close company': Reading and Companionship in Brenda Walker's Reading by Moonlight, Australian Literary Studies 27.1 (May 2012).

Kim Cheng Boey's Between Stations: 'The Architecture of Memory', Life Writing 11.1, 2014.  

Bodies of Knowledge: History, Memory, Selves in Tiger’s Eye, Antipodes 26.2 (2012), 209-214.

Talking amongst ourselves: Auntie Rita, a private and public conversation of healing, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 28.1 (Summer 213), 150-166.

 

Further Essays

Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake: A Work in Progress, Southerly 66.1 (2006), 91-105.

Singing it anew: David Malouf's Ransom, JASAL 11.1 (2011).

Unpacking Castro’s Library, or Detours and Return in The Garden Book, 'Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors: JASAL Special Issue', 2007.

Literature and the Intimate Space of Death, Noel Rowe's 'Next to Nothing' and Alex Miller's The Sitters, Antipodes 22.2 (2008) 103-109.