The Secret History, 30 years on: Looking back on a milestone book
Marjorie Brennan: Donna Tartt’s compelling and murderous tale of a clique of classics students who fall under the spell of a charismatic professor at an elite American college connected with me in a way that few books have since
There are some books that serve as milestones in our lives, evocations of a particular time and place tucked between the timeworn covers. For me, The Secret History is one of those.
As a teenage undergraduate on the cusp of adulthood, Donna Tartt’s compelling and murderous tale of a clique of classics students who fall under the spell of a charismatic professor at an elite American college connected with me in a way that few books have since.
It was something of a shock to realise recently that this month marks the 30th anniversary of its publication, in 1992. Since then, the book has become a cult classic, albeit a bestselling one, shipping more than five million copies. It has also been experiencing a huge resurgence in popularity recently thanks to TikTok, with videos relating to the book receiving hundreds of millions of views.
This has been driven mainly by the ‘dark academia’ sub-culture which the book epitomises. In the broadest of terms, it can be described as a nostalgia-fuelled genre and aesthetic strong on scholarly pursuits and boarding school chic with a gothic edge (the movie Dead Poet’s Society is another mainstay).
A number of factors have contributed to the book’s enduring popularity. The major one is the mystique which continues to surround Tartt, the coolly hip and poised Mississippi native with a bob as razor-sharp as her intellect. One of the most hyped debut novelists of her era, The Secret History was published when she was only 28 but was reportedly eight years in the making.
A graduate of the prestigious Bennington College in Vermont, an obvious inspiration for the book’s Hampden College, she received a $450,000 advance for the book, which she earned and then some. Adding to the clamour surrounding the book, The Secret History was dedicated to Tartt’s former classmate at Bennington, Bret Easton Ellis, who the previous year had published the equally hyped American Psycho, which attracted huge controversy and sales to match.
Tartt’s talent also jumped off the page, and she expertly combined a tantalising plot, the evergreen appeal of the campus novel and the arcane attractions of Greek myth, making The Secret History a defining book for Generation X — and now a source of fascination for Generation Z. It also managed the publishing holy grail of appealing to readers across the literary and commercial fiction genres.
There are shades of The Great Gatsby protagonist Nick Carraway in the narrator Richard Papen, an outsider both attracted to and repelled by the rarified circle he finds himself in. Comparisons were also drawn with the elusive author JD Salinger as it became clear that Tartt disdained publicity.
She proved to be equally Salingeresque in her output. She has only written two novels since The Secret History — her second novel, The Little Friend, was published a decade after The Secret History, in 2002 and while generally well-received, it didn’t generate the same excitement as its predecessor. Her next novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013 and proved more successful, winning a Pulitzer but polarising readers — I am one of those who loved it.
I can’t say I felt the same about the stiff and lifeless movie adaptation, which sank like a stone. It is interesting that a film has never been made of The Secret History, although at one point director Alan J Pakula had the film rights for Warner Brothers with Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne on screenplay duty; after Pakula was killed in a car crash, Gwyneth Paltrow was reported to be developing it. With streaming platforms constantly scouting for content and book adaptation opportunities, it may yet make it to the screen.
The lasting influence of The Secret History on the publishing industry can be seen in the continued appetite for stories based on Greek myth and it may even have had an influence on the Harry Potter series (JK Rowling has previously cited Tartt as one of her favourite authors).
The irony of course is that three decades on from becoming a literary superstar, we may never know what the author herself thinks of her newfound TikTok fame — she is perhaps the least likely author to embrace social media. There is also the tantalising possibility that she is busy writing — next year marks the ten-year anniversary of the publication of The Goldfinch, surely time to produce another classic.
There were several occasions over the years when I had been tempted to dust off my own copy of The Secret History, but I hesitated, perhaps fearing that something I loved in my youthful vigour would disappoint me in my more jaded middle age. The anniversary of its publication this month seemed like an opportune time to pick it up again.
It is perhaps not surprising that, as the TikTok generation would say, the book hits different now. Much of it strikes me as pretentious and Tartt’s erudition while admirable comes across as youthfully performative. My more mature critical self had the mental editorial scalpel at work, thinking she could have lost a hundred pages without the plot suffering.
I can see though why the book connects so much with a new generation of readers — in my own case, I read it a time when, like most teenagers, I was struggling to assert my identity and was ripe for its existential themes. Though it turned out that I could not recapture what I felt when I originally read the book, no more than I could be the same person I was when I read it.
There is of course a poignancy to it all that I’m sure Tartt would appreciate. To quote the poem by AE Housman, who is also alluded to in The Secret History: "That is the land of lost content,/ I see it shining plain,/ The happy highways where I went/ And cannot come again."
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