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, Elsie's secure and sheltered environment is shaken with the return of two men from fighting in the German East African campaign of the First World War. One is her shell-shocked boyfriend and the other an unemployed brother who subsequently gets involved in illicit diamond dealing.
Rather than indulge in self-pity, she puts her strong pacifist feelings to work by volunteering as a nurse at a military field hospital in Belgium, where she meets her future husband and where exposure to the horrors and futility of industrial warfare changes her worldview. She joins with other women calling for peace and universal suffrage. After the war, she is thrown into further conflict when her husband is involved in South Africa 1922 miners' strike.
Yet, still determined to assist women in need, she creates a care centre for physically abused women and single pregnant mothers, giving them protection and hope of a better future. Elsie is an inspiring story of courage and hope in a time of war, civil conflict and the fight for women's rights.