Rugbeian and writer, Dolly Alderton, has her Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice coming out later this year. Thomas Eyre-Maunsell, Head of English at Rugby School, invites her on a trip down memory lane, to discuss literature, life at Rugby and lessons learned in celebration of 50 Years of Girls at Rugby School.

“My entire life was just this monogamous educational experience with Dr Shaw”

TEM       We’re talking teachers straight away, and Dolly is delighted to discover ghosts from the past that shaped her Upper School time at Rugby - Emma Moyle, Jo Scanlon, Tim Shaw - are, 20 years on, very much still flesh and blood at Rugby School.

DA          My A-levels were English language, English Lit and Theatre Studies, so I essentially spent my entire life in two rooms of New Quad. English language was my favourite academic subject. It was the first time in my life I felt like a clever person. I felt so lucky that Rugby offered that. Dr Shaw at one point was teaching me Language and Literature, so my entire life was just this monogamous educational experience with Dr Shaw, which was great because he was so cool and so engaged in bringing the outside world into the classroom. It was stimulating and exciting for me. It was a great, great department, and if English is still in the same building, New Quad is the most beautiful building on the whole campus.

“The two years I did at Rugby were the two happiest years of my teenage life”

TEM       Griffin was a new House when Dolly joined in Upper School. She had been living in the London suburbs and was clearly ready for a change, which she writes about candidly in her award-winning memoir, Everything I know About Love.

DA          I had Mr Naylor for Literature A Level, and Mrs Naylor was my Hm. Imagine being at boarding school for the first time in your life living in a house with that couple? It felt like family. Mrs. Naylor had this wonderful phrase that she said, over and over again: “Just get it right”, which essentially meant, “we get that you're away from your parents, that's fine, but don't put yourself in danger, don't put other people in danger and don't get caught”. We had loads of fun. I think the excitement of Griffin being a new House was there too. It was funny because Mr Naylor was in House but he also taught me A Level Literature with Dr Shaw. So, it was a nightmare for me at times because, of course, I could never lie to him when I hadn’t done prep! He would know perfectly well that I had been loafing around in my pyjamas watching Friends [required TV watching for teens in the late nineties and early noughties]. But he was really brilliant too: passionate about the literature that he taught. The two years I did at Rugby were the two happiest years of my teenage life, but I was never someone who wanted to be in school. I always knew my life and my identity would begin outside of school.

“Just because you haven't studied literature it doesn't mean that you can't have the same really valid connection to it”

TEM       Dolly is talking to me, quite literally, on a break from being on set for her new adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. She studied all sorts of “blue chip” texts at school, but, as luck with have it, she never actually studied Austen. As it happens, current A Level students here at Rugby are studying Darcy and Lizzy Bennet as we speak.

DA          I would have been absolutely hooked on Austen at school. I just read Austen when I was a young woman but there’s such a cult around Austen: people can be so obsessive about her that I always felt, because I had never studied it, I'm never going to really be one of those Janeites. But when the job came, I re-read Pride and Prejudice and then I researched lots of papers about it, and had lots of discussions about it. I suddenly thought - I guess this is how you become a Janeite!  I wish I could go back and say that to my younger self, “just because you haven't studied literature it doesn't mean that you can't have the same really valid connection to it”.

TEM       And how do you top the 1995 BBC series? 

DA          Pride and Prejudice has got so many developed characters that are full of interesting quirks, mysteries, questions to be solved, hypocrisies and complexities. There's enough room for me to do my interpretation and my interrogation of the story, just as there will be stones that are unturned for a person in another 20 years. It's limitless, like a multifaceted gem, that story: it looks different in so many different lights.

“Increasingly I just feel like a novelist and a screenwriter”

TEM       Dolly is a bit of a multifaceted gem. So which facet is the most fun?

DA          Increasingly, I feel like a novelist and a screenwriter. The two balance each other out really beautifully and I feel so lucky that I get to do both. When you're writing scripts the days go really fast. It reminds me of when I was acting at the Edinburgh fringe. When you’re screenwriting, it's kind of improvisation in your head. With prose, you kill yourself over the fact that a woman is wearing a shade of a jumper that you can't describe in a way that is both accurate and enjoyable to read! The nature of writing novels is very challenging, but it's also very satisfying. But when you get the order of words right, It's like you’ve solved a Sudoku.

“Boarding school definitely gave me that independence”

TEM       We’re back to school, of course, and with fifty years of girls at Rugby on our mind, I invite Dolly to reflect on the co-educational environment at Rugby.

DA          Being around boys was definitely right for me, even though they had no interest in me and I found them on the whole pretty underwhelming. I think that it broke a bit of a spell for me because, other than my brother and my cousin, I had basically not been around boys since I was born, and the all-girls school that I was at until sixteen was on the top of a hill! Jilly Cooper is very funny about this.  She said something similar about her all-girls school experience, where any man that came onto the campus, whether he was a 70-year-old gardener or the Bursar, the entire school were all instantly love-struck. I think that that kind of deification of the opposite sex, in equal parts beguiled and terrified of them, to get that knocked out of my system and to realise that they are just as vulnerable, embarrassing and normal as me and my girlfriends, I think that was a really, really good thing for me before I went to university. Sharing, living communally before you leave school with people outside of your immediate family is a very good exercise in learning  how to get on with people you wouldn't necessarily get on with - how to compromise and how to live communally. I think it's great training for a young person.

TEM       Advice for budding writers?

“If you’re reading widely and you’re reading unpretentiously …, your craft will get better”

DA          Try and write every single day, whether it's privately or publicly, whether it's a newsletter or blog or just a diary, Just try. Even if it's just a sentence, try to keep writing every day. Oh, and I remember a lecture at Rugby where the eminent speaker said, “The quality of your output as a writer will be directly correlated to the quality of the input”. So much of writing is just impersonation. You do end up accidentally impersonating the writers who you spend the most time with. So, if you're reading widely and you're reading unpretentiously, and you're reading people who entertain and engage you, who write well, then, inevitably, your craft will get better.

TEM       Message for current Rugbeians?

DA          The problem is that the greatest lessons I've learned, and the most fundamental truths I’ve discovered have taken, literally, decades of heartache and embarrassment and disappointment and grief and sadness and, you know, these lessons that are so hard won are all just clichés: they're all stuff that your mum used to tell you when you were fifteen that you didn't understand. The number one thing I would say is to not grow up too fast.

TEM       Dolly must return to the set of Pride and Prejudice, and I must return to my A Level set, where Darcy is about to propose to Lizzy Bennet.