Expect a sort of erotic Jane Eyre and you won't be far wrong. Rosina (Minnie Driver) is a feisty, bright Jewish girl from the London of the 1840s. Reduced in circumstances after the murder of her father, she takes a governess position on remote Skye, posing as gentile Mary Blackchurch. Her particular Mr Rochester, Cavendish (Tom Wilkinson), is an inventor, exploring the embryonic art of photography. Rosina, soon mastering her spoiled charge (Florence Hoath) and charming Cavendish's brittle, bored wife (Harriet Walter), discovers the master's lab, becomes his helper and, after chancing on a way to preserve images on paper, his lover too. The passion with which she flings herself into the affair, alas, leads to a backing-off and ultimate betrayal. Overall, this is an absorbing narrative with a bitter-sweet tailpiece. Driver and Wilkinson create interesting characters although the role of the Cavendish son (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), sent down from Oxford, seems extraneous and could be dispensed with altogether.

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