Elsie is a riveting story told with gut-wrenching reality of a woman's courage set against a torrid period in South African and world history.
Growing up in a small diamond-mining village near Pretoria, South Africa, her secure, sheltered environment is shaken with the return of the two men in her life from fighting in German East Africa during the First World War... a shell-shocked boyfriend and an unemployed brother who gets involved in illicit diamond dealings with dire consequences. Rather than indulge in self-pity she puts her strong pacifist feelings to work by volunteering as a nurse at a military hospital in Belgium where she meets her husband to be and where exposure to the horrors and futility of industrial warfare changes her worldview, and she joins with other women calling for universal suffrage. After the war, she is thrown into further conflict when her husband is involved in the bloody confrontation of the 1922 miners' strike in South Africa. She later opens a care centre for abused women and single pregnant mothers, giving them protection and hope of a better future. Elsie is a fighter for justice and is prepared to go to any length to achieve her aims.