I tracked down a copy of Tide Race after a friend sent me a link to a film that is part of the BFI's free film offering called Island Artist. In the film Brenda is seen scampering agilely over the rocks of her beloved Bardsey island with her dog. What appealed to me most was that she looked like a women in her element, at ease in her own body, being true to herself.

Tide Race is a book about a women who fell in love with island life and longed to live there. 'Listen: I have found the home of my heart.' Brenda writes at the beginning of the book. 'I could not eat: I could not think straight any more: So I came to this solitary place and lay in the sun.'

But solitary living on the island was not really what Brenda wishes for. She is honest about this . 'Could I dare plunge into hermit-life? Alone, most certainly not. With a man, perhaps.' So she sets out to lure her beloved Paul to the island and is remarkably honest over her fears that he will not love the island as she does and her joy when he appears to slip easily into the fisherman-farmer's life.

She is clear-eyed about island life and the people there. Portraying the remnants of the 'old people' who own the land, not as romantic characters but people who live harsh lives. The women bound to a life of endless children and domestic drudgery, fearful of their men being lost to the sea. The men ruling families with fear. The incomers, who appear to be accepted but never fully integrated, are either melancholy outsiders who never quite discover what they came to the island to find or would be holy men, driven mad by solitary living.

Brenda writes vividly of the islanders in-fighting, the dangerous boat crossings, how the domestic and farm work almost eclipses the time for painting and writing. It is a world of houses close to collapse, inward looking people who resort to talking about the lives of the mice when they become cut off for weeks from the mainland. It is a world where a baby can die with a doctor far away.

Her writing switches between narrative, and dreamlike visions in a way that is a little hard to follow but her writing about landscapes is on par with Nan Shephard and she is a writer that deserves to much better known.

After reading the book I made the mistake of investigating more about Brenda Chamberlain's life and was sad to read that she committed suicide before her 60th birthday. I wish there had been a better ending for her but in Tide Race she captures the moment in her life when all the elements came together. I hope her spirit remains, scampering over the rocks of her beloved Bardsey.

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