THE STORY – Edinburgh, 1810. Teachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods embark on their dream of an independent life together and open a boarding school. Their lives are changed forever when a wealthy aristocrat enrols Jane Cumming, her “illegitimate” 15-year-old grandchild from India. The teachers struggle to integrate the girl who remains an outsider among her classmates. Miss Pirie and Miss Woods are brought closer to Jane when her grandmother insists they look after her over the summer. Private and professional lines blur, affection between them grows, and they start to form an unlikely family. Tensions rise, however, as the new term begins. The two teachers are overwhelmed by the girl’s increasing desire for closeness as well as by their own changing relationship. As Jane begins to feel excluded from her new family, she demands to be taken home to her grandmother. An accusation follows, which leaves the teachers in an existential battle, resulting in a legal fight that would last a decade and scandalise the Scottish establishment. Based on true events.
THE CAST – Flora Nicholson, Clare Dunne, Mia Tharia, Fiona Shaw & Frankie Corio
THE TEAM – Sophie Heldman (Director) & Flora Nicholson (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
“The Education of Jane Cumming” is the sophomore feature from German-born director Sophie Heldman. It’s a powerfully moving period drama inspired by “Scotch Verdict,” Lillian Faderman’s 1983 book about a real-life court case so scandalous that Scottish lawmakers sealed the records for a century. The film formally adapts Faderman’s account, though the story has circulated for decades in altered forms. In 1934, it was reshaped into a play by Lillian Hellman, which led to two sanitised Hollywood versions: “These Three” (1936), co-starring Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, and William Wyler’s “The Children’s Hour” (1961), starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine and earning five Oscar nominations. Heldman’s film, by contrast, returns to the historical roots of the case and restores the elements that have long been softened or erased.
Set in 1810, the story follows teachers Marianne Woods (Clare Dunne) and Jane Pirie (Flora Nicholson, who also wrote the screenplay) as they open a boarding school on the rural outskirts of Edinburgh. Seeking social legitimacy, they are delighted when the wealthy aristocrat Lady Jane Cumming Gordon (Fiona Shaw) enrolls her two young granddaughters. The arrangement comes with a stipulation: they must also admit Lady Jane’s son’s illegitimate half-Indian daughter, the teenage Jane (Mia Tharia). Matters grow more complicated when Lady Jane insists the two women care for the girl over the summer, leading to an intimate period in which the trio shares a beach house and forms a tentative emotional bond.
Nicholson’s accomplished, sensitive script layers the narrative with themes of race, class, sexuality, colonialism, and coming of age, while also interrogating the slippery nature of truth. Much of the emotional undercurrent is conveyed through Heldman’s restrained direction, which favours glances, silences, and charged proximity over overt declarations. We watch Jane gradually come alive under Marianne’s and Jane’s attention and affection, making the eventual rupture all the more devastating. When Jane asks to become a teacher at the school and is refused, her wounded pride mutates into a retaliatory accusation that threatens the women with social ruin and drags them into a bruising legal battle. The subsequent courtroom proceedings, in which the legal establishment struggles to comprehend even the concept of lesbianism, are at once absurd, darkly comic, and deeply unsettling.
The performances anchor the film’s emotional force. Dunne and Nicholson share palpable chemistry as they craft distinct personalities: Marianne is warm, open, and beloved by her pupils, whereas Jane is more reserved and pragmatic, and it is she who ultimately initiates the legal case. Tharia proves a revelation, delivering a riveting turn that balances aching vulnerability with fierce independence, as her isolation among the other children is keenly felt. Her Jane is determined to shape her own destiny, even when that resolve leads her toward destructive choices. In supporting roles, Fiona Shaw brings unexpected nuance to Lady Jane Cumming Gordon, hinting at layered motivations and emotional ambiguities, while Stephen McCole makes a strong impression as John Clerk, the lawyer who takes up the women’s cause.
Visually, the film is equally accomplished. Kate Reid’s luminous cinematography makes evocative use of landscape and negative space, and Isabel Meier’s production design renders the school, shot at a National Trust property outside Edinburgh, almost idyllic, a stark contrast to the turmoil that unfolds within it. Fittingly for such a female-centred narrative, many of the key creative roles behind the camera were also held by women, including editor Isabel Meier and art director Gail Bowman.
In reclaiming the story’s queer core from decades of distortion, most notably the Hays Code era alterations in “These Three” and the cautious obliqueness of “The Children’s Hour,” Heldman delivers a richly textured, emotionally resonant period drama. More than a historical corrective, it is a thought-provoking coming-of-age story that finally places Jane at the center of her own narrative, granting her the complexity and agency long denied in what can only be described as a highly recommended picture.
