Lucy Marsden, an elderly woman, relives the terror of the Civil War through her memories of her husband, Captain Willie Marsden, whom she married when she was just 14 years old.

The movie, adapted from Allan Gurganus' 1989 book of the same name, chronicles the life of Lucy Marsden, a ninety-nine-year-old North Carolina woman who, at the age of fourteen, married a fifty-year-old Confederate veteran of the Civil War and bore nine children (reduced to six for television). Diane Lane stars as Lucy from her teenage years into middle age, and Anne Bancroft plays Lucy approaching her one hundredth birthday, telling her story in flashback.