In an attic office on Belfast’s University Square, Prof Elaine Farrell’s phone beeps with messages about her book being made into a Hollywood movie. The academic has just finished four hours’ teaching 19th century crime and punishment to Queen’s University students. She waves online to Prof Leanne McCormick, her co-author from Ulster University, who is at home in Coleraine sitting in front of an old map of New York.
It is days since Variety broke the story that Daisy Edgar-Jones will lead the cast in a film based on the historians’ acclaimed book about the forgotten lives of Irish emigrant women jailed in the US and Canada during the 1800s.
Bad Bridget began as a research project a decade ago. The pair laugh recalling the day they kept typing the name into a university computer because, McCormick says, they were “really worried it was som
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