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Online Thumbnail Credits: Wellcome Collection Public Domain

— Written by The Critic

“A dark academia book you should absolutely read,” said some post in some corner of our usual 21st-century media suspects – YouTube, Instagram, Substack, Reddit. Written in the early 1990s, this book – The Secret History by Donna Tartt – has been taken up as something of a cult classic in the BookTok niche, and perhaps even more widely now, as we remain on the cusp of assigning a proper collective name to our growing online genre of scholarly, academic, intellectual content. 

I had resisted it for a long time – refusing to engage with a text brought to me by our darling, dearest, ever-present social media algorithms. It’s one thing to come across a recommendation from one or two niche accounts on a single platform – allowing, of course, for the occasional online plagiarist. But when something is recommended vigorously by virtually all algorithms, things start to feel a little bit… what’s the word? Suspicious. 

Suspicions aside, I physically stumbled across the book at the beginning of the year – after nearly a year or two of hearing about it online – and saw it was half price. I thought, “fudge it, let me get it”. 

At the time, I was reading The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Now…this book does not get mentioned in “dark academia” lists – or, for that matter, in academic fiction lists more broadly. But if you’re a scholar – dedicated to your study, desiring discipline, wanting a book that will make you seek after scholarship even more than you already do, committing yourself to becoming learned and learnedly grounded – then this is exactly that kind of text. It presents a kind of utopian scholarly world: money is no issue, libraries are well-funded, and one is simply given the freedom to pursue knowledge. It is, perhaps, the ideal of scholarship.

It likely wouldn’t fit the material or visual aesthetic of dark academia – tweed jackets, dark monotone colours, gloomy settings. Although maybe it aligns with the themes the genre tends to typically gesture toward: bookishness – or at least scholarly life – university settings (or something like them; Castalia is a pedagogical province, though given its monastic tendencies, perhaps it is closer to a monastery than a university), and, of course, its overwhelming Eurocentrism – white, male, canonical.

All this to say, after thoroughly enjoying and being positively moved by The Glass Bead Game, and noticing its vague resemblance to what might be called the dark academia sub-culture, I thought – “well, well, well, perhaps these internet recommendations have something going for them”. And so, I caved and bought The Secret History.

It sat on my bookshelf for at least a month before I decided, right – it’s time. I made my first ever foray into a BookTok-recommended dark academia book.

*

The book is – as you might already be aware – about a group of six classics students under the guidance (or shall I say, influence?) of a rather mysterious yet wildly charismatic professor at a liberal arts college in rural Vermont. So independent, so alternative, these students live a college life that strays far from the “norm,” the “expected.” They are described by Richard – one of the six students, and the narrator through whom the story unfolds – as almost always dressed in “dark English suits,” tweed jackets, blazers, tennis sweaters – attire that wasn’t so much in vogue for the rest of the campus.

As the newest addition to this elite group, their appearance and outward manner of being is one of the first things Richard notices – and tries to mimic – as a way of becoming accepted. He is desperate to belong, to be like them. 

As he gradually discovers, their carefully curated appearance is an extension from their inward philosophical orientations, particularly their troubling relationship to morality and ethics – a “desperation to see the world as it is not.” This, too, becomes something Richard must contend with, as he is not only invited into the group, but slowly moulded by it – into their way of thinking and intellectual posture.

In this regard, one of the central themes The Secret History engages is the moral danger of aestheticisation. 

Richard, for whom college is essentially an escape from a deeply unhappy life in California, is seduced by the elitist charm of this small, insular department – made up of just six people before he joins. Their mystique is intoxicating. They are more than just different, they are supra-normal in their exclusivity. A clique that is not only separate from the rest of the student body, but somehow above it. They are devoted to ancient Greek culture, wealth, aloofness – to a rejection of the modern world. In many ways, they resemble a cult – and Richard is drawn to the idea of belonging to it, one that is visibly embodied in how they live, dress, and move through the world. The professor, Julian, selects his students, initiating a structure of elitism that becomes ingrained – reproduced through a surface that is at once “picturesque but terror-striking”.

It is here that the warning is presented. 

As Richard buys into this world – going to great lengths to become part of it – he finds himself entangled in increasingly disturbing acts, including murder. What he comes to realise, too late, is that beneath this cultivated exterior lies a perilous moral detachment. But the surface holds. What matters is that he believed in it – and in trying to emulate it, he became something he did not fully understand, participating in things he could not have imagined.