Secret societies, candlelit libraries, ancient languages, murderous friendships and young people who appear to own an improbable number of woollen coats: dark academia has become one of contemporary reading culture's most persistent fascinations. But beneath the tweed and tragedy lies a rather more interesting question. What, precisely, are modern readers looking for when they retreat into its cloistered halls?
There is something faintly absurd about the modern reader's conception of university life. The actual student, very often, attends lectures beneath fluorescent lighting, eats something regrettable from a plastic container, submits an essay through an online portal at eleven fifty-eight in the evening and discovers, somewhere between an overflowing inbox and a group project whose other members have mysteriously ceased to exist, that the intellectual life is not quite the procession of leather-bound books, philosophical quarrels and rain-darkened quadrangles which literature had led him to expect.
And yet it is precisely this other university, the impossible one, perhaps, or at least the university recollected through the distorting glass of imagination, that has returned with extraordinary force to popular fiction.
Dark academia, with its libraries and Latin, its secret societies and scholarly rivalries, its beautiful young people acquiring an education considerably more dangerous than anything advertised in the prospectus, has escaped the rather narrow province of literary fiction and become an aesthetic, a publishing category, an internet subculture and, most interestingly of all, a fantasy of intellectual life to which readers return with almost devotional regularity. The question is not merely why readers like it. The more curious question is: why now?
The university has been useful to novelists for a very long time, chiefly because it provides, with almost indecent convenience, everything a story requires: ambition, hierarchy, rivalry, sexual entanglement, intellectual vanity and a collection of people young enough to make terrible decisions while being educated enough to defend them at considerable length.
Campus fiction is therefore nothing new. What dark academia has done is to take the familiar machinery of the university novel and lower the lamps. Its most frequently invoked modern ancestor is Donna Tartt's The Secret History, in which a small circle of classics students at an elite Vermont college become so intoxicated by beauty, exclusivity and their own intellectual exceptionalism that murder appears, for a time, less an atrocity than a philosophical inconvenience. Richard Papen's entrance into their world has since become almost the foundational fantasy of the genre: the outsider admitted into a beautiful, cultivated and faintly forbidden society, only to discover that elegance is not the opposite of corruption but may, under favourable circumstances, furnish it rather beautifully.
Later novels have altered the furniture without abandoning the house. M. L. Rio's If We Were Villains turns Shakespearean performance into rivalry and violence; R. F. Kuang's Babel places scholarship, language and imperial power in deliberate collision; Leigh Bardugo's Ninth House populates the secret societies of Yale with occult horrors; Mona Awad's Bunny takes the rarefied absurdities of a creative-writing programme and worries at them until they become grotesque.The particulars differ. The temptation does not. Again and again, the reader is invited through a door marked PRIVATE, and again and again, he enters.
For all its murders, ghosts, betrayals and assorted academic catastrophes, the deepest pleasure of dark academia may be embarrassingly wholesome: it makes learning seem important. Not useful. Not marketable. Not the first step in a carefully optimised professional trajectory. Important.
Its students translate Greek at midnight, argue about metaphysics over wine, become consumed by Shakespeare, mythology, art, theology or linguistics; they pursue knowledge with the sort of dangerous earnestness ordinarily reserved, in contemporary life, for financial success or romantic love. They may be vain, pretentious, morally disastrous and occasionally homicidal, but nobody could accuse them of regarding education merely as a credential.
This matters because the modern student has inherited an increasingly utilitarian vocabulary of learning. Degrees must justify their expense; subjects must demonstrate employability; skills must be transferable; reading must improve something, produce something, lead somewhere. Even leisure is liable to be transformed into self-improvement, and a book which does not make us richer, cleverer, calmer or more productive sometimes seems in danger of being hauled before a tribunal to explain itself.
Dark academia stages a small rebellion against this. Here, knowledge is permitted to be excessive. A dead language may consume your life. A poem may alter it. A painting may deserve an afternoon. An argument may continue until dawn simply because nobody involved can bear to abandon it. The fantasy is seductive because it restores to intellectual life something modern culture has been quietly draining from it: romance.
It would, of course, be foolish to pretend that the clothes have nothing to do with it. Dark academia is unusually conscious of its own appearance. There are oak-panelled rooms and Gothic arches, fountain pens and marginalia, autumn leaves decomposing artistically upon ancient stone, cups of coffee growing cold beside open books and enough brown wool to keep a modest nineteenth-century nation warm through winter.
The visual vocabulary has flourished online precisely because it translates so easily into photographs, mood boards, videos and reading lists. One need not have access to an Oxbridge library to participate; a battered paperback, an overcast afternoon and a strategically positioned cup of tea will do much of the work. But to dismiss this as superficial would be to misunderstand what aesthetics often accomplish. The appeal of the candlelit library is not finally the candle. It is concentration.
The fountain pen is not desirable merely because it is handsome; it represents deliberateness. The old book suggests continuity. The silent reading room suggests attention. Even the absurd quantity of tweed evokes a slower and more ceremonious existence, one in which thoughts may develop uninterrupted and an afternoon need not be dismembered into notifications, messages, clips, tabs and alerts.
Dark academia's analogue world is therefore peculiarly attractive to a digital generation because it imagines something now luxurious precisely because it was once ordinary: undivided attention. Readers are not simply yearning for old buildings. They are yearning for a mind with the door shut.
Almost every dark academic story contains a circle. Sometimes it is a class, sometimes a society, sometimes a cohort, sometimes merely six intolerably clever people who have decided that nobody else is worth speaking to; but whatever its form, the group is small, exclusive and difficult to enter. This is essential. The fantasy of dark academia is not simply the fantasy of being intelligent. It is the fantasy of being recognised as intelligent by precisely those people whose recognition matters.