A taste of ‘An Education’

One of the more popular Oscar bets doing the rounds is that, along with rising star Carey Mulligan, writer Nick Hornby will find himself in the race for Sundance favorite “An Education.” (I have a hunch the film may do even better than that, but that’s me.)

In contrast to the wealth of popular books reaching our screens this year, however, Hornby’s adaptation has taken a rather more circuitous journey: his script is a fictionalisation of journalist Lynn Barber’s autobiographical short story which appeared in Granta magazine a while back, but is actually just a taster for Barber’s full-length memoir, which is only being published later this month. Still with me? Good.

I will of course be covering all this in a Page to Screen column eventually. For now, the Observer has helpfully provided a 6000-word extract from Barber’s memoir that essentially covers the events that inspired the film, wherein a wide-eyed 16 year-old girl experiences the rush of first love and heartbreak at the hands of an older man in early 1960s London. It’s a delightful read — warm, melancholy and streaked with acerbic humor — and gives some idea of what to expect from the film. I particularly liked this extract, which balances specific personal emotion and sly social critique quite beautifully:

Events overtook me in the last few days of term. Miss R Garwood Scott the headmistress somehow got wind of my engagement and summoned me to see her. Was it true I was engaged? Yes, I said, but I would still like to take the Oxford exams. She was ruthless. I could not return to school (in those days you had to stay for an extra term to do Oxbridge entrance) if I was getting married. When was the wedding and which church would it be in? Not in church, I said, because my fiancé was Jewish. Jewish! She looked aghast – “Don’t you realise that the Jews killed Our Lord?” I stared at her. “So I won’t take the Oxford exams,” I said. My little gang was waiting for me outside her study. “I told her I was leaving,” I announced. “She tried to persuade me to stay but I refused.” They all congratulated me and begged to be bridesmaids. Then I went to the bogs and cried my eyes out.

Barber also offers an addendum on the film itself, and it’s clear she’s ecstatic with how it turned out. I recall that she referred to it, in passing, as a “masterpiece” in a recent Observer interview with one of the film’s stars, Rosamund Pike. Here, she gushes at greater length, professing herself “knocked out by the brilliance of the acting and the incredible care and authenticity that had gone into getting the period detail right.”

She also drolly adds: “If anyone wants to believe that I was as pretty as Carey Mulligan when I was 16, by all means go ahead.” It would appear that the character of Barber’s older lover got an aesthetic upgrade in the film’s transition to fiction, given that her description of him as a “rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man” doesn’t exactly square with the  image of Peter Sarsgaard.

This further context only heightens my excitement for the film, which I had a good feeling about even before Sundance. If you wish to remain completely innocent of potential spoilers, you should probably steer clear of the story. For the rest of us, however, it’s clearly the must-read of the weekend. Check it out here.