Academy Award winner Bette Davis stars as a schoolteacher determined to help the people of a turn-of-the-century Welsh mining town. Discouraged by students who don't believe knowledge will help them, a mine owner who wants to keep his workers illiterate and a local squire who doubts the villagers can improve their lives, the teacher begins to doubt that she can help. But then she discovers a young miner with a talent for writing and thirst for knowledge. She instructs, cajoles and demands he study ... until he is accepted at Oxford.