Doctor Pursues Her Dream Against Odds in ‘Bramwell’

“Bramwell,” a four-part “Masterpiece Theatre” beginning Sunday, is really two series in one, although that isn’t the intention.

The first half is a compelling chronicle of the overwhelming challenges facing an English female doctor who dares to brave Victorian-era society’s scorn by intruding upon a male domain.

The second half tumbles headlong into Gothic romance territory.

“The female brain . . . is not suited to scientific matters” is the prevailing opinion that Dr. Eleanor Bramwell (Jemma Redgrave) is up against at a time when a fashionable “cure” for female depression was a hysterectomy.

Redgrave, granddaughter of Sir Michael, is perfectly cast as a gifted, stubborn young woman pursuing her dream and bruising her idealism and naivete on the realities of class and male and female roles in the mid-1890s.

The first episode finds Eleanor earning the enmity of an arrogant surgeon (Robert Hardy) with her superior treatment of a laborer’s injured foot and with her objection to the surgeon’s proposed solution for a syphilis case.

In the second segment, Eleanor’s spirit and skill earn her the patronage of a wealthy widow (Michele Dotrice), who sets her up in an infirmary in the slums. There, Eleanor learns that do-gooding doesn’t necessarily earn gratitude.

She’s also given a lesson in compassion after she gives short shrift to an aging, alcoholic music hall actress (Shirley Anne Field), who turns out to be the beloved mistress of her physician father (David Calder). Field and Calder are splendid.

In parts three and four, writer Lucy Gannon takes an abrupt detour, plunging Eleanor into dark plots involving a family’s criminal confinement of an heir to a fortune and the possible murder of a woman by an attractive male doctor.

The cast is uniformly fine throughout, however, and the series, directed by David Tucer and Laura Sims, is beautifully filmed with a keen eye for authenticity.

A warning: If “ER” hasn’t inured you to surgery close-ups, blood and other bodily fluids, you will have to avert your eyes a few times during these four hours.

* “Bramwell” premieres at 9 p.m. Sunday on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KOCE-TV Channel 50.