An island of women (mostly)

[bibliogramma]

The Fires of Bride, Ellen Galford

Lizzie is a researcher with Caledonian Television’s Features and Light Entertainment department. It’s time for the channel to fulfil its “statutory obligation to provide a certain number of programming hours of cultural and social material covering peripheral Scottish viewing areas” and so Lizzie is sent off to Cailleach, “the outermost island of the Utter Hebrides” to hunt down subject matter for a documentary.

There she meets former lovers Maria Milleny, an artist who has lived on the island for years but is still called “the incomer,” and Catriona MacEochan, local doctor and clan chieftain.

Their story, told in flashback, slowly unveils an ancient tradition of Goddess-worship centred on the island’s two archaeological sites – the ruined convent of St Bride and the standing stones of the Callieach Ring – and a renewed recognition of the social, sexual, economic and spiritual power of women on the island, much to the dismay of the Reverend Murdo MacNeish, minister of the Second Schismatic Independent Kirk of the Outer Isles.

A wise and witty exploration of women’s sexuality and spirituality, with a large dose of social satire and feminist sensibility – and it’s funny, too.