![]() ![]() Like her characters, Tartt was a classics student, and her classical references add a whole extra layer to The Secret History. Richard's lower-middle-class background makes him something of an interloper in this wealthy clique – but, of course, everyone loves an outsider in fiction. After initially being refused enrolment to the school's ancient Greek class, where students are handpicked by charismatic professor Julian Morrow, Richard is eventually allowed into the exclusive club, joining fraternal twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. Fleeing California for New England is a way to escape his family and the boredom of home – but when he arrives at Hampden a whole new world opens up to him. In The Secret History, Richard Papen lands at Hampden almost by accident – finding a brochure for the college in his coat pocket and applying on a whim after a fight with his parents. It's intelligentsia, it's snobbery, it's privilege, all of these things that are a breeding ground for incredible fiction." "It's young people out on their own in adulthood for the very first time," says Petrou."It's people let loose and behaving badly. The enclosed campus world, with its own rules and hierarchies, coupled with characters coming together from different backgrounds and hoping to reinvent themselves, lends itself to compelling stories. "There's the obvious parallel, that it's set on a small campus and about intimate friendship, but also the general chilliness, a cruelty that you can't quite put your finger on, that makes you uneasy." The Secret History fits into a long tradition of novels set on university campuses – including Petrou's latest, Stargazer, about two friends at a remote Canadian university in the 90s, which she admits is inspired by her love of The Secret History. The unease, the coldness through it it was the book that really made me a reader and a writer." It was just so beautiful and so poignant. Near the start, where Richard is talking about the monotony of adolescence, I remember that hitting such a chord with me. "I related to it in a way that I didn't really relate to any of the books that I was being told to read in school. She first read the novel in school when a friend lent it to her. "I've had so many copies of that book that I've dropped in the bathtub, given away to people or that have just fallen into disrepair," she tells BBC Culture. On its release, The New York Times said: "Imagine the plot of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment crossed with the story of Euripides' Bacchae set against the backdrop of Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction and told in the elegant, ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited."Īuthor Laurie Petrou has read The Secret History "dozens" of times. The reader is already in on a secret – the novel is then a story of two parts what led up to the death of a classmate, and what happens in the aftermath. From the book's chilling prologue, we know straight away that the narrator Richard Papen and his friends have committed a terrible crime. Part thriller, part coming-of-age campus novel and part Greek tragedy, The Secret History begins with one of literature's most memorable first lines "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation". ![]() Donna Tartt has since published two more books – including 2014's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Goldfinch – but it's her debut that has made the biggest impression. Thirty years on, it's still in the cultural conversation, attracting a whole new generation of fans through TikTok. ![]() Since its publication, it has sold more than 2.3 million print copies in English alone and been published in 40 languages. It became the kind of book people read dozens of times and excitedly press into the hands of others. On its publication, in September 1992, The Secret History became an immediate critical and commercial success, one of those rare novels that makes as much of a splash in literary circles as it does on the bestseller lists. I was writing it for myself and my friends," Tartt said in an interview in 2018. "I just thought I was writing an old-fashioned, very bizarre book that was to no one's taste except my own. Here was a book both inspired by and about a love of Greek mythology, a melancholic tale of a group of classics students at an elite New England university who share a terrible secret, told in Dickensian detail. When Donna Tartt was writing her debut novel, The Secret History – an endeavour that took her eight years – she wasn't convinced there would be much of an audience for it. ![]()
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