The Secret History by Donna Tartt: A Full Summary and Guide
What it is about
Donna Tartt's first novel was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. It is a campus novel set at Hampden College, a small elite liberal arts college in Vermont, and the action is presumed to take place in the mid-1980s. Six students study Classics together under a single professor. One of them ends up dead, killed by the others.
The structure is unusual. This is an inverted detective story, which means the reader learns who died and who did it very early on. The question is not whodunnit but how it happened and what it costs. Richard Papen narrates from a distance of years, looking back on the chain of events that led to the murder of his friend Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. The details arrive in sequence, and much of the book is concerned with the aftermath rather than the act.
Richard arrives at Hampden from Plano, California, wanting to study literature. He finds he cannot simply enrol in the Greek classes of Julian Morrow, the only Classics professor, who hand-picks a small wealthy group and insists they take nearly all their classes with him. Julian controls their academic lives entirely. Richard helps the group with a translation, and they get him admitted. Being let in is the beginning of everything that follows.
The main characters
Richard Papen is the outsider and the narrator. He comes from a working-class background and is ashamed of it, which shapes almost every choice he makes. One winter he stays near campus in an unheated warehouse rather than ask anyone for help, and nearly dies of hypothermia and pneumonia. Henry Winter finds him and takes him to hospital.
Henry Winter is the reclusive prodigy of the group and, increasingly, its organising intelligence. Charles and Camilla Macaulay are orphaned twins who share an apartment. Richard falls for Camilla and never recovers from it. Francis Abernathy is elegant, closeted and wealthy, and his aunt's country house is where the group spends its weekends drinking. Bunny Corcoran is the loud one, the one who does not quite fit the group's idea of itself, and the friction between him and Henry is visible to Richard long before he understands it.
Julian Morrow is the sixth presence in the story. His students adore him. His teaching gives their private world its justification, and his influence over them runs far deeper than a timetable.
The themes
Morality is the engine of the book. The group act on an idea of beauty and transcendence absorbed from ancient texts, and the novel follows the logic of that idea past the point where most people would stop. Richard tells us early that he has a fatal flaw, a morbid longing for the picturesque. The novel asks what happens when aesthetics are allowed to stand in for ethics.
Class runs through every page. Richard lies about his origins to be accepted. The money that insulates the others from consequence is never discussed directly, but it does the work. Francis and Henry can pay Bunny off for months. Richard cannot afford a heated room.
Then there is corruption, and how slow it is. Nobody in the book decides to become a murderer. A drunken bacchanal in the woods leaves a local farmer dead, Bunny finds out by chance and starts blackmailing them, and the second killing is presented to the group by Henry as the reasonable solution to a practical problem. The novel is interested in how a group talks itself into something.
Death is the last theme, and the one that does the most damage. The murder resolves nothing. Francis's hypochondria worsens, Charles sinks into alcoholism and becomes violent towards Camilla, and Richard becomes addicted to pills. The friendship that seemed so enviable turns into a trap with no exit.
Why it still matters
Knopf printed 75,000 copies of a debut novel that would normally have received around 10,000. It became a bestseller. The first edition jacket was designed by Chip Kidd and Barbara de Wilde and remains one of the most recognisable American book covers of the decade. The novel was originally titled The God of Illusions.
Its longer influence is on a whole aesthetic. The Secret History is widely credited with originating the dark academia sub-genre, which The New York Times described as exploding like a firework into the literary scene. Candlelight, Greek verbs, old money, moral rot. Thirty years of imitators have not displaced the original, partly because Tartt commits so fully to the seduction before she shows the damage.
How it ends (spoilers)
The five surviving students confront Bunny on a hike and Henry pushes him into a ravine. They keep their cover, but the group begins to come apart. Julian eventually receives a letter Bunny wrote in Rome describing everything. He recognises the hotel stationery, understands it is true, and simply leaves campus for good. Charles, drunk and convinced Henry means to silence him, bursts into a hotel room with a gun, shoots Richard in the stomach by accident, and Henry kisses Camilla before shooting himself.
The epilogue scatters them. Charles flees rehab with a married woman. Camilla is left nursing her grandmother. Francis, outed to his grandfather, is forced into a marriage he hates and attempts suicide. Richard becomes an academic, still in love with Camilla, back in the California he cannot stand.
