The Making of a Lady

Frances Hodgson Burnett, better known for her Victorian YA novels The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, also wrote the grown-up gothic thriller The Making of a Marchioness—the source for this U.K. TV movie. Emily (Lydia Wilson), a poised but penniless young woman who is rented out as a domestic by a soon-to-be-defunct London agency, unexpectedly receives the offer of a lifetime—marriage, wealth, comfort—from widowed, middle-aged Lord Walderhurst (Linus Roache), the nephew of her most recent employer. Walderhurt, businesslike and reserved but kindly, needs a childbearing mate to prevent his ancestral estate from winding up in the hands of his wastrel pariah cousin, Alec (James D'Arcy). Emily would rather marry for love, but she accepts the nobleman's proposal, and thus finds herself isolated at his vast country estate (which is 10 miles from anywhere). When Walderhurst is called to serve in his old regiment in India, Emily is left vulnerable in a house that is suddenly invaded by Alec and his Indian-born wife, leading to an atmosphere of increasing menace and deadly betrayal. Modern viewers might see this as a story that critiques upper-class British values, or underscores how a lack of options (especially for women) at the time ultimately inspired desperate acts, or even one that offers a retro-imperialist take on colonized India as a distant, savage source of seduction and death that sometimes reached across oceans to endanger proper English folk. In any case, this is a handsome melodrama that will likely appeal to Downton Abbey fanciers. Recommended. (C. Cassady)