Broken Barrier is a taut love story portraying two bookish people thrown together in the mid-twentieth century on Staten Island, New York. Lydia Allen, descendant of Loyalist refugees who left America in 1783 at the end of the American Revolution, struggles to preserve the rural lifestyle and handsome estate that her ancestors built in eighteenth-century New Brunswick. She goes to work for a rich young American as a housekeeper in order to make money to save her estate.