Megan Chance's "A Dangerous Education"

Megan Chance is the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of more than twenty novels, including A Splendid Ruin, Bone River, and An Inconvenient Wife. She and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

Here Chance dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, A Dangerous Education:

Given that I think very cinematically when I write, and have always assigned the roles of my characters to actors and pinned their pictures all over my office (very reminiscent of my young teenage years when posters of David Cassidy were on my ceiling), this is a pretty easy one for me.

More than that, for this book in particular, I had movies on the brain before I even started writing. A Dangerous Education is a story of a teacher who must come to terms with her own wayward past as she tangles with a dangerous clique at a boarding school for rebellious girls of influential families—and all of this during the repressive era of the 1950s, McCarthyism and the Cold War. I wanted the novel to have a similar feeling to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock, not just the novels, but the movies made from them. I wanted dangerous, illicit, creepy, sensual—feelings often associated with girls’ adolescence. I’d also seen the Amazon series based on Picnic at Hanging Rock, with Natalie Dormer, and I wanted that feeling too, that propulsive malice.

Rosemary Chivers is angry, vulnerable, and struggling against the repressiveness of the curriculum she’s supposed to teach, I wanted a strong woman unafraid to say what she thinks and often getting in trouble because of that. Also someone with a sense of humor, because that particular woman in the 1950s would have to have one. When I watched the Starz series The White Princess, with Jodie Comer as Elizabeth of York, I had my Rosemary. Watching her in Killing Eve only cemented that.

For the girls, the actresses I chose are all too old to play the parts now, but I was looking at them in their younger years: Maddison Jaizani, from Versailles (now Bess in Nancy Drew) was my perfect Maisie. Kaya Scoledario (Skins, The Maze Runner) was Sandra, and Anya Taylor-Joy (Emma, The Queen’s Gambit) an excellent Jean. Each of them personified the girls beautifully.

And because I’ve been slightly obsessed with Luke Pasqualino since he was in the BBC’s The Musketeers, and he has the most vulnerable eyes, I picked him for Bobby.

For a director: a woman certainly. Emerald Fennell maybe? Niki Caro? Sofia Coppola? I’d want someone with a dry sense of humor and that ability to capture the enigmatic challenges of the 1950s, adolescence, and impossible decisions. If she could give it even the slightest touch of Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Picnic at Hanging Rock feel, I would be more than satisfied.

Visit Megan Chance's website.

My Book, The Movie: A Splendid Ruin.

Q&A with Megan Chance.

The Page 69 Test: A Dangerous Education.

--Marshal Zeringue