Family ties and moral quandaries complicate the romance of an intelligent and attractive young woman in director Ronald Wilson's emotional adaptation of George Eliot's popular novel. A clever lover of the arts whose wit and grace are exceeded only by her striking grace and outward beauty, mill-owner's daughter Maggie Tulliver incurs the wrath of her stubborn father and prosaic brother when she forges a strong but unlikely bond with deformed nearby neighbor Phillip Wakeam. Her secretive relationship bitterly denounced by her disapproving brother, Maggie receives a devastating blow when her father dies of a stroke following a bitter feud with Phillip's father -- a powerful attorney with strong local ties. Upon becoming intimately involved with her cousin Lucy's urbane and handsome fiancée, Maggie's problems elevate from the merely objectionable to the outright scandalous.