Margot Robbie’s company to make movie based on Northern Ireland academics’ stories of poverty and prison
It started as a trawl of dusty archives for an academic project about female Irish emigrants in Canada and the US by two history professors, a worthy but perhaps niche topic for research.
The subjects, after all, were human flotsam from Ireland’s diaspora whose existence was often barely recorded, let alone remembered.
They were impoverished girls and women who wound up on the wrong side of the law and lived and died in penury, footnotes in the mass migrations to New York, Boston and Toronto in the 19th century.
But the two academics who mined police, court and prison archives for this hidden world of female crime coined a term, Bad Bridgets, that evolved into a hit podcast, a book and now a Hollywood film.
