AllMovie

Julie Harris portrays the poignant short life of the great English writer Charlotte Brontë in this filmed version of Harris's tour-de-force, one-woman act. Filmed on location in Ireland (substituting for Brontë's Yorkshire home), the landscape brings forth the author's stunning natural environment, and the house and its furnishings evoke a 19th -century setting. The drama begins in 1849 when Charlotte comes back home to her minister father after attending the funeral of her sister Anne, dead at age 29. Younger sister Emily died the year before, her brother Bronwell before that, her colorful Aunt Branny and many others have also died. Jane Eyre has just been published two years earlier -- Charlotte's triumph flung in the face of so many tragedies. As she walks around her home, she recalls people and times gone by, a love that never came to realization, the dissolute life of her brother, and her father's insistence that she never marry -- memories are nostalgic, caustic, humorous, and always captivating.