What are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want? Your pride, your health, your family…yourself?

This is a key question I asked throughout my viewing of A Woman of Substance, now streaming on BritBox, in between my yelling at the characters for their decisions. Now, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adored this opening season (as season 2 has already been confirmed), and was entranced from the beginning. Jessica Reynolds is compelling as a young Emma Harte, stuck in the mundane and often unfair world of societal classes and the poor treatment of the working population in the early 1900’s. As a maid in the upper-class Fairley household, she finds herself planning (with a capital P) an escape, until a life-changing situation unravels her plans, and warps her perseverance into rage-filled revenge against those who wronged her.

Woven throughout the past is the present, with Brenda Blethyn as the modern version of Emma. She has now built an empire, but it is slipping through her fingers due to the conniving of her family. Not to mention her granddaughter and protégé reconnects with the very family that Emma has sworn to hate for, well basically, eternity.

But yeah, I yelled a lot, mainly because it was painfully obvious what (I thought) was the right path, versus the ones certain characters took – especially Adele Fairley (played by Leanne Best) and Emma, both fueled by addiction and obsession.

For Adele, that addiction comes quite literal in the form of a decanter. Her alcoholism has driven her into a reclusive state, and she continuously battles within herself about who she is now, and who she used to be. Her relationship with her husband Adam Fairley (Emmett J. Scanlan) is tumultuous at best, although there is still a deeply-obsessive connection with one another, even though Adam has all but replaced her in status with her sister Olivia (Lydia Leonard). Every time she set the bottle aside, I cheered…and every time she picked it back up, I grieved.

Emma has her own addiction as well, in the form of revenge. Throughout the series she very plainly states that she is determined to destroy the Fairley family. Sure, she also says it’s for her own family’s well-being, but really Emma is fuelled by hatred and rage.

What do they both lose? What does it cost them both? For Adele, it costs her not just her family and relationships, but it costs her herself as well. She loses sight of who she truly is.

And Emma? I fear Emma’s actions cost her peace: peace of mind, peace of place, and peace of purpose. Emma is talented, witty, intelligent…she has perseverance and courage. But instead of “using her powers for good,” to use the phrase, she uses her gifts to destroy. Sure, it looks like she is using them to build this great name for herself, but at what cost? At the cost of what could have been.

I don’t pretend to say my ways and hopes would have been better for the characters, but that is what is so engaging about A Woman of Substance. I felt connected to them, as if I wasn’t just witnessing their journeys, but walking alongside them. This is very much attributed to the strength of the writing from Katherine Jakeways. Every character drew me in, and I believed every experience. So much so, I might have once again yelled at the close of the final episode. Emma’s smirk was a promise that she would once again be willing to pay any price to win.

A Woman of Substance is now streaming on BritBox.