As described in a film magazine,[3] Prunella (Clark), who lives in a garden with her three aunts Prim (Berwin), Prude (Harris) and Privacy (Cecil), is carefully guarded from the outside world until the day a troupe of travelling players comes to town. Pierrot (Raucourt), the leader, creeps into the garden and captivates Prunella's heart. She runs off with him and becomes his Pierrette. For two years they wander from country to country. Pierrot tires of his marriage vows and runs away. He finds what a miserable thing life is without her, and he returns to the Dutch gardens and finds her, is forgiven, and they live on, presumably in blissful happiness.
Film biographer Paul O’Dell in his Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood (1970) commenting on Prunella:
According to literary critic Edward Wagenknecht, Marguerite Clark’s best picture was probably Prunella, directed in 1918 by Maurice Tourneur. From the stills available the film looks fascinating, and one cannot agree more with Wagenknecht than there is “no motion picture at present unavailable to students of cinema which would be more important to recover.”[4]
Screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, also commenting on the still photographs from this lost film, reports that “Marguerite Clark’s screen image was a compound of whimsicality and frail beauty.”[5]
Housman, Laurence, Granville-Barker, Harley, Prunella; or, Love in a Dutch Garden, New York: Duffield and Company, 1913 edition, on the Internet Archive
