The four pretty young Misses Admiral, having shed their tyrannical Scandinavian Pa, are kicking up their heels dancing the charleston, when their orphaned niece Jenny arrives from Australia to live with them. The child is as romantic and flighty as they. In spite of their game efforts to rear her respectably, Jenny joins the household as just one more frolicsome girl, though considerably shorter and with freckles. Dear Hearts and Gentle People is a playful pastorale set in a New Zealand country town in the late 1920s, where folk, full of simplicities and ironies, had an unspoken resolution to remain European in outlook, despite the besieging ferny hills, wild flax swamps, and the twilight forest of a Maori sorcerer.