Australian actress Anne Louise Lambert – famous for her lead role in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976) – starred in this adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s evocation of lost love and youth in 1863, dramatised in four parts by the BBC.
Paul Manning (Dominic Guard), an engineer working on constructing a new railway in rural Cheshire, visits his uncle – the Reverend Ebenezer Holman (Ian Bannen) – at his nearby home, expecting a severely religious household.
He is delighted instead to meet his lively young cousin Phillis (Lambert), to whom he is briefly attracted, before coming to view her as a sister-figure.
Life changes for Phillis when a colleague of Paul’s – young engineer Edward Holdsworth (Tim Woodward) – becomes ill and recuperates at the Holman farm. The innocent young girl falls in love with Edward.
When he recovers, though, Edward is offered and accepts employment in Canada and leaves immediately, telling Paul that he will return in two years to marry Phillis.
Phillis falls into a decline, and Paul revives her by telling her what Holdsworth has said. But before the two years are up, a letter arrives from Edward announcing his marriage to a Canadian girl.
Phillis collapses with “brain fever” and is in a delirium for weeks.
Phillis Holman Anne-Louise Lambert Paul Manning
Dominic Guard Edward Holdsworth
Tim Woodward Reverend Ebenezer Holman
Ian Bannen Margaret Holman
Georgine Anderson Bessie Norton
Daphne Oxenford
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