Bronte: A Portrait of Charlotte is based on letters written between Charlotte and her childhood friend and confident, Ellen Nussey. The play takes place over the course of a single day, in which Charlotte arrives home at Haworth, after burying her beloved sister Anne in Scarborough. She is faced with the daunting possibility that love might never find her, that she will never find time to write again and that she will remain a prisoner caring for her aging father in the bleak parsonage at Haworth.