An abridged version of the story of an orphaned young English woman who accepts employment as a governess at Thornfield Hall, a country estate owned by the mysteriously remote Mr. Rochester.

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naive young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long...

In Scotland in 1791, eight-year-old Martha Morse, who would grow up to become the great-grandmother of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, meets her new governess and learns the difference between growing up a laird's daughter and a child of a cottager.