MovieChat Forums > Bramwell (1995) Discussion > Eleanor Bramwell: I detest you!

Eleanor Bramwell: I detest you!


I started off really liking this show and rooting for the character of Eleanor Bramwell. However, as the series progressed, I started seeing the horrible nature of this main character seeping out with each episode and along the way I grew to detest her. The one episode where she was excluded as they focused on Nurse Carr is now my favourite since Eleanor was not in it.

This woman, a so-called doctor, was directly responsible for much suffering, because she had a tendency to ruin everything she touched. She was always sorry yet life went on for her as she destroyed the life of that girl with the large head; the man who was hiding during the war and was later exposed by her to win points with that officer she was lusting after, just to be beaten to death; and let's not forget that innocent child who was perfectly safe with her mother -- yet Eleanor handed her over to a total stranger [a ruthless madam] just to have the child lose her life and suffer through untold horrors before her death. The child begged not to go with the woman yet Eleanor asked no questions and just shoved her off to the devil itself. Even when she showed initial concern, she went skating first with her officer boyfriend.

What she did to that poor child is beyond disgusting, She never even apologised to the child's mother for what she did. The so-called sadness from her was her own self-pity because once again she was wrong. When she told on that Dutch fellow and he was beaten to death, she still kept carrying on with her officer boyfriend even though she pretended to be so outraged. And look how she treated Dr. Marsham in the end, as though he had no feelings at all. Then the writers tried justifying Eleanor's actions by making the doctor the bad one who frequented brothels and so Eleanor had all right to cheat on him and marry someone else. This woman was never held accountable for her wrong deeds, not even in the end as her happy ending came along.

This show started out with such a good premise but along the way turned into a major disappointment in characterisation. The main character should be likable and not someone the viewer grows to dislike. I personally grew to detest the character of Eleanor Bramwell and found her nature to be seriously flawed, to the detriment of others. Her ego, stubbornness, selfishness, and misguided impulsive mind-set wound up undermining much of the good she professed to do and destroyed many lives in the process.

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YOu know I sort of agree. I started the series on NetFlix and the more I watched the more I realized how many of those who truly love Eleanor like Dr. Marsham got brushed aside for a pretty face. Part of me feels more for the people that the lives she disrupted in the guise of good deeds. How I watch the show and see how in my own life I have been tossed aside and hurt by those who state they are only doing good or had the best intentions. and in the very final episode....what did they do with Stanley!!!!! The porter boy! There all of the sudden is a new one. You can see where cast was just being dwindled down constantly and then in the end Dr Marsham, my favorite character gets the brunt of the worst treatment.


How shameful.

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OMG!!!! I completely agree! we just finished Bramwell on Netflix last night and had the same infuriating response. It was clear that the last couple of episodes were made by different people than the first 3 seasons....the quality was bad, Robert Bramwell and Kate were completely missing and what was with all that dramatic music? arrgghhh! and poor Doctor Marsham...he was lovely and she kicked him in the throat. We decided that if the first 3 episodes were like the last few episodes we NEVER would have continued through the whole series...

I was actually really gunning for her to get killed off...say run over by a carriage or "accidentally" shot by a rogue soldier

anyways onto Monarch of the Glen...gotta fill the time before Downton Abbey comes back

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I have to agree. We are only into the 2nd season on NetFlix, and I'm already starting to abhor Eleanor. She has a pretty good knack for killing her patients. Maybe that was par for the course for a medical practitioner in 1895, but the way of portraying Eleanor first as a "modern-thinking" woman who is single-handedly dragging Victorian medicine into the 20th Century, only then to show her later as an incompetent butcher, is just too much for me.

Also, I'm not too happy with the general formulaic approach to the show: every episode, one of the characters gets something good near the beginning of the story, only to lose it later (usually due to the inane vagaries of Victorian morals). The examples are too numerous to list but a smattering is: Daniel Bentley and his foot, Eleanor and her fiancé, the Thrift and a new facility for it, Eleanor and her position as Registrar for Dr. O'Neill, Robert Bramwell and his Fellowhip to the Royal College of Physicians, etc.

Now, after having seen ~ 10 shows, ten minutes into a new episode, I can predict with uncanny accuracy what the outcome will be.

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How funny. I just went to this board to see if I was being unfair. DrPhoton- be warned - you'll need to ff through the last 2 episodes as they are 1.5 hours long (on Netflix anyway), but I like closure and did just that. To the Monarch viewer - you'll notice too that the quality goes downhill and the show should have ended much sooner, but hey Susan Hampshire is just great and Paul Freeman a hunk and Julian Fellowes just amazing.

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@aarriw: you are so right about Monarch!!!

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I'm just finishing season 3 and I don't think I'll watch on. I can appreciate the Victorian issues--we can NOT place our modern filter on this, and they did a good job with many of those issues. But if one person should have been above reproach, it should have been Eleanor. That isn't to say she wouldn't have made mistakes--in the medical world before antibiotics, most people who went to doctors died. Period. But her mistakes are on a lavish scale and as is pointed out here, ALWAYS involve Eleanor making a mistake based on her own pride, ignorance, or biases. From that perspective, the show does more to hurt the image of women in film than to help it.

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Quite right,the woman is a self-centred "Loose cannon". Consistently doing more harm than good.When she gets into strife(and that happens frequently)she is great at demanding that those who had previously advised caution should come to her "professional rescue". I think she ruined her society doctor dad's career.As a quack,I feel quite strongly about this lady doctor,we didn't have headstrong unskilled people like her at MY medical school!
Last night,on the radio,I heard Michael Crawford comment on how he keeps in touch with Michele Dotrice and she is well. "No thanks to Dr Bramwell",I heard myself muttering!!;-)

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I am FASCINATED by this thread! Indeed, I'm really ticked off at her character. I can NOT understand how we are supposed to relate to her. I keep feeling disgusted by her choices. And her sexual behaviors in that social climate at a time without effective birth control... I just cannot see a physician taking such a HUGE risk. One pregnancy - indeed, just the information that she had been to bed unmarried, could completely destroy her career. As a person who spent 19 years in university and training to be called "Dr."; I was incredulous at her behaviors. I would have to be mentally ill to risk throwing away ALL that work I did (and money I spent!!). It just didn't ring true for me.

Like the other posters here, I found myself alternately angry toward or disgusted with her - and the way they just dumped the father and we never heard from him again?!?! What the...????

And poor Marsham - a totally decent fellow who was so buffeted about and, I feel, taken advantage of. This series was a huge disappointment to me. When I first started watching, I was delighted by this story line. But those horrid things kept happening and I had an urge to just reach out and smack the protagonist. I've never smacked anyone!

This main character truly does provoke ire. How on earth did they come to decide this was a good story to create, film, and air? I would rather watch the grass grow!



You know what they say... no one with missing teeth wears an Armani suit.

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So, we're now in the 21st century but still ridiculing single women who have sex. I think your expectations are outrageous, not Dr. Bramwell's behavior. Besides, I don't think a main character always needs to be likable. I'm thinking of the show "House" (though admittedly his character is complex, not simply unlikable).

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"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"--Pres. Merkin Muffley

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I agree, LordManhammer. Taking lovers was not uncommon in Victorian society, especially with so many arranged marriages and country house weekends. I've studied literature and history (mainly British) much of my life. As humans, we seem to gravitate to so-called heroic characters, many of whom tend to be a bit one-dimensional. Most humans are flawed, so Eleanor Bramwell seems eminently normal. Perhaps modern viewers have become so accustomed to modern medicine (which itself remains far from perfect) that they expect cures all the time. After spending years teaching English and Art History, I started writing historical novels. My research has shown the brutality of life in earlier times. Doctors had limited resources far longer than many people realize; as recently as the 1960s, many parts of the population were under-served by the medical profession. All too many remain so.

I also discovered there were more ways to prevent pregnancy than people realize; they may have been inconsistent, but they were there, especially for the wealthy, let alone for doctors. I can also understand Eleanor's zeal for breaking new ground in medicine after the way many of the male quacks treated her. Having been raised by her doting father after her mother died in childbirth, Eleanor seems bound to waffle between wanting to be a modern woman and wanting to be a good Victorian. Her father was a former Army doctor, so she no doubt heard of or even witnessed quite a few awful incidents. At the same time, Eleanor means well, as we see in the episode from season 3 in which Marsham's wife is diagnosed with breast cancer just as they are moving to Edinburgh, where he had landed a great job in a hospital. Eleanor is gentle with the terrified Mrs. Marsham and with the couple's three daughters. Despite Marsham's attack upon Robert after the elder Bramwell breaks the bad news, both Bramwells offer to operate upon Mrs. Marsham after the Harley Street specialist refused to treat her because the cancer was too advanced. Those who see Dr. Marsham as the innocent victim of Eleanor need to remember he also has flaws, as does Nurse Carr.

Clearly, the writers changed by the fourth season, which left many of us shaking our heads. Robert and Alice cut her off when she refused to live with them, so they do not appear. Eleanor clearly seems at loose ends without them, despite her engagement to Marsham, which seemed a marriage of convenience. The Army was not a good fit for Eleanor; however, people should remember she had been around officers, including her own father, many times. Perhaps it was natural for Eleanor to search for a companion back in the institution where her father had spent so many years. Many Victorian literary heroines find they either must leave their homes, families or even their lives (usually in childbirth or through suicide) as part of their maturation. Eleanor fares better than many of those women, as she finds a husband who was willing to leave his career to marry her.

Put puppy mills out of business: never buy dogs from pet shops! 

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I was shocked with how willing she was to split up a family because they lost the father. She wanted to send a 10 year old girl who had a mother and siblings off to Canada. Never to see them again.

No concept that the poor love their children and struggle to keep everyone together.

As it turned out that practice (a very real one with Dr. Bernardo) was enslavement.

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I'm just on Season 1 Episode 4 of this series, and I'll continue to watch despite the negative comments I've read in this thread about the featured character. She had successfully operated on the drunkard with hernia, though she lost the mother in a breach birth, but saved the baby, with help from her father. Then I admire her sense of justice when she persevered in finding out the truth about the death wife of Dr. Hunter, finding proof she was murdered instead of dying because of heart failure.

I like how the series show the pleasant and unpleasant side of that period, and how the woman doctor faced so much antagonism from colleagues and from the public in general, just because she dared to stay in a profession long dominated by and for males. So many trying to put her down, and with her trying hard to forge ahead despite her medical equipments being, as her father described them, as "barbaric" and that he has seen "better in battlefields."



Truth inexorably,inscrutably seeks and reveals Itself into the Light.

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Torian, I agree with everything you say here and I do hope you enjoy the show enormously. My issue was different from some of these people. My main issue was that she was so reckless with her own well being - having unprotected sex multiple times. After all her work and sacrifice, she took an enormous risk of unwed pregnancy. Just one pregnancy could have destroyed everything she had worked so hard for. I know - I am female and I went through sixteen years of schooling and training to be "Dr." There is NO WAY I would have risked destroying all that. Even when I was young - 40 years ago - an unwed pregnancy was VERY shameful and absolutely would have hurt my reputation. In her time - the time of this series? It would absolutely have destroyed her career. I don't think for a minute she would have done that.

And I really disliked how she treated Marsham. He was a decent fellow and deserved better.

As for the filmmakers, I'm absolutely baffled by the end of the series. Dad disappears - not a word about him - and the tone changes. A lot. Overall, I dislike the thing - on the whole. I liked the first part - I wish they had stuck with whomever was writing or putting that together.


You know what they say... no one with missing teeth wears an Armani suit.

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You have to be careful about that, because we assume they wouldn't. They just weren't talking about it.


http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2737/did-victorian-era-doctors-use-vibrators-to-treat-hysteric-female-patients-with-orgasm-therapy
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG97/blues/simmons.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_19575_5-ridiculous-sex-myths-from-history-you-probably-believe.html

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I communicated poorly. Apologies. I'm talking about her getting pregnant and what that would have done to her reputation - it would have destroyed it, unless she were married. There wasn't much tolerance for female physicians at the time as it was. Add to that a pregnancy and her career would have been over. Sorry that I was not clear.



You know what they say... no one with missing teeth wears an Armani suit.

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I went to the IMDB board to see if I was not the only one to hate Dr Bramwell the daughter. She ruins everything and everybody she touches and she's driven by ambition and selfishness. I hated her when she said to Kate "Oh no, rice pudding again!" and put her plate away... she's a silly girl only interested in making her point with men who sent her away at the beginning. When the poor girl with the head deformity was operated on, I was so angry with Eleanor. She only want to prove that she's better and smarter than the others, when she was fired at the start of the series, she was so pissed...
I am like you all I dislike her and I don't wish her well. The only thing I like about her is her first name, because it's my daughter's!
I so like nurse Carr and Dr Marsham, and I liked Mr Bentley too.

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I somewhat agree, but I hold the writers responsible for the flaws. The added doses of soap opera were, I feel, the fault of bored writing, not true growths of our Dr. Bramwell

I think the idea is this woman has the ideals, priorities, and hopes of a modern person trapped in a Victorian world. The impulses we, the viewers, have tend to be in-line with our good Dr. Bramwell. She, like us, believes in the autonomy of her patients, the right to a healthy and equal life, justice and truth for people suffering with disease regardless of their class. Unfortunately those noble desires have perverted outcomes in her world where the medicine is inadequate to meet the needs and the people are deceitful, hateful, and much worse.

She is striving for a better world, just a bit naively. That world is not achieved more often than not, but there aren't too many times when I can say her character should have known better. I will, however, concede there are times when the writers should have known better; things are a bit formulaic into the second season.

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