The Secret History

Around 1985, Richard Papen leaves his hometown of Plano, California, to study literature at the elite Hampden College in Vermont. Richard finds he cannot enroll in the classes of the sole Classics professor Julian Morrow, who limits enrollment to a hand-picked coterie: twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran. After Richard helps them with a translation, they give him advice on endearing himself to Julian, and Richard is accepted into his classes.

Richard enjoys his new status as a member of the clique, but notices several odd behaviors from the others: they seem to constantly suffer small injuries, boil strange plants on the stove, and attempt to hide bloody clothing. The group is devoted to Julian, who requires his students to only take classes with him and asserts sole control over their academic careers. Though Henry seems to have a strained friendship with Bunny, they spend the winter break together in Rome, while Richard lodges in an unheated warehouse. He nearly dies from hypothermia and pneumonia, but is rescued when Henry returns unexpectedly and brings him to the hospital.

In the new year, tensions between Bunny and the group worsen. Bunny constantly insults the others and begins behaving erratically. Richard learns the truth from Henry: the group, minus Richard and Bunny (and with Julian's approval), held a Dionysian bacchanal in the woods near Francis's country estate. During the bacchanal the group kills a Vermont farmer, although the details of how this death occurred are left ambiguous. Bunny found out by chance and has been blackmailing the group since, with Francis and Henry giving Bunny large amounts of money in the hopes of placating him. No longer able to meet Bunny's demands, and fearing that he'll expose them as his mental state deteriorates, Henry convinces the group to kill Bunny. They confront Bunny while hiking, and Henry pushes him into a ravine to his death.

The group struggles to maintain their cover, joining search parties and attending Bunny's funeral. Though the police presence eventually dies down, the group begins to crack under the strain: Francis's hypochondria worsens, Charles descends into alcoholism and abuses Camilla, Richard becomes addicted to pills, and Henry realizes he has no moral objections to murder. Richard learns that Francis has had sexual encounters with Charles; Francis believes the twins have also slept with each other. As Charles becomes even more possessive of his sister, Henry arranges for Camilla to move from their shared apartment to a hotel, further incensing Charles.

Julian receives a letter purporting to be from Bunny, detailing the bacchanal murder and Bunny's fear that Henry is plotting to kill him. Though Julian initially dismisses it as a hoax, he realizes the truth when he notices the letterhead from Henry and Bunny's hotel in Rome. Instead of addressing the matter, Julian flees campus and never returns, much to Henry's grief and dismay.

Charles' alcoholism and enmity towards Henry worsens as Henry begins living with Camilla. When Charles is arrested for drunk driving in Henry's car, Henry fears Charles will turn on and expose the group, while Charles fears that Henry may kill him to keep his silence. Charles barges into Camilla and Henry's hotel room with a gun and tries to kill Henry. In the ensuing altercation, Richard is shot in the stomach, and Henry shoots himself in order to cover for the rest of the group. Ultimately, Richard survives and Henry dies from his wound. The police report concludes that, in a suicidal fit, Henry inadvertently shot Richard.

With Henry's death, the group disintegrates. Charles descends further into alcoholism and runs away with a married woman; Camilla is left alone caring for her ailing grandmother; and Francis, though homosexual, is forced by his wealthy grandfather to marry a woman he despises and attempts suicide. Richard graduates from Hampden as a lonely academic with an unrequited love for Camilla. The novel ends with Richard recounting a dream meeting Henry in a desolate futuristic museum. After a brief conversation, Henry leaves Richard to contemplate his unhappiness.

• Julian Morrow: an eccentric classics professor at Hampden who teaches only a small group of students whom he selects for their intellect, connections, and wealth. Julian was a prominent socialite in the 1940s, associated with T. S. Eliot. The independently wealthy Julian donates his salary to Hampden, with which he has a strained relationship. Julian extols the virtues of Greco-Roman society, and is viewed as a father figure by his students, who are taught nearly exclusively by him.
• Richard Papen: a transfer student of modest means from California. He feels insecure about his background and so embellishes it to fit in with his fellow classics students. Richard reluctantly follows Henry's plans but does not put up serious resistance. Despite his portrayal of himself as an innocent bystander, it becomes increasingly evident throughout the story that Richard is deeply flawed and values appearances more than ethics.
• Charles and Camilla Macaulay: Charming, orphaned fraternal twins from Virginia. The complex relationship between the twins is characterized by jealousy and protectiveness. The twins frequently host the group for dinner. Camilla is a love interest of both Richard and Henry.
• Henry Winter: a polyglot intellectual prodigy and published author with wealthy Nouveau riche parents and a passion for the Pāli canon, Homer, and Plato, he is the unofficial leader of the group and is Julian's favorite student. Despite his intellectual talents, Henry did not graduate from high school due to injuries from an accident.
• Francis Abernathy: a generous and hypochondriac student from an old money background, whose secluded country home becomes a sanctuary for the group. Francis has an overprotective mother with a history of drug addiction who sent him to several elite European boarding schools. Francis would later briefly appear in Tartt's later novel, The Goldfinch.^[6]
• Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran: a jokester who despite appearances of wealth, is in fact penniless and unabashedly takes advantage of his friends. Bunny's bigoted attitudes such as anti-Catholicism and homophobia antagonize other group members. Bunny is the least academically talented of the group; he has severe dyslexia and did not read until age 10. Unlike other group members, Bunny has a girlfriend and friends outside of the group. He is outwardly social and thought of by outsiders as funny and scholarly, but in reality is extremely egotistical, immature and impulsive.
• Dr. Roland: a doddering old professor of psychology, for whom Richard works as a research assistant.
• Georges Laforgue: a professor of French, and Richard's first academic advisor.
• Judy Poovey: one of Richard's dormmates. Also a California native, she has a one-sided sexual infatuation with him, and he only goes to see her when he wants something from her.
• Marion Barnbridge: Bunny's girlfriend, who for one reason or another keeps her distance from the group.
• Cloke Rayburn: a drug dealer, and Bunny's best friend from high school.
• Katherine and Macdonald Corcoran: mother and father of Bunny and his brothers Teddy, Hugh, Patrick, and Brady. Mr. Corcoran, a former Clemson football star, passed on many of his mannerisms to his sons.

The Secret History partially draws its inspiration on the 5th-century BC Greek tragedy, The Bacchae, by Euripides.^[7]

According to Michiko Kakutani, some aspects of the novel reflect Nietzsche's model of Apollonian and Dionysian expression in The Birth of Tragedy. Kakutani, writing for the New York Times, said "in The Secret History, Ms. Tartt manages to make...melodramatic and bizarre events (involving Dionysian rites and intimations of satanic power) seem entirely plausible."^[8] Because the author introduces the murder and those responsible at the outset, critic A. O. Scott labeled it "a murder mystery in reverse."^[9] In 2013, John Mullan wrote an essay for The Guardian titled "Ten Reasons Why We Love Donna Tartt's The Secret History", which includes "It starts with a murder," "It is in love with Ancient Greece," "It is full of quotations," and "It is obsessed with beauty."^[10]

The main characters' romantic and sometimes hedonistic lifestyles spiraling into moral ruin has prompted questions surrounding the portrayal of the Classics discipline. Sophie Mills describes Tartt's depiction of the Classics as nuanced: in a 2005 article, Mills said the Classics are portrayed as an "enemy of the ordinary: intriguing, stimulating, and individualistic, perhaps, but even more, exclusive, curiously cold, and impractical."^[11]

Hailed for its stylistic qualities and atmospheric prose,^[12] "beauty is terror" is a recurrent idea throughout the text. Richard admits he has a "morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs", a reason he is drawn to the aesthetic appeal and mystique of the Classics students upon his arrival at Hampden and chooses to change his academic interest to the Classics. It is Julian's teachings of the Classics, ethics, and aesthetic philosophy that influence Henry, Camilla, Charles, and Francis to commit an act of Dionysian revelry, which ends with the murder of a farmer and their spiral into moral ruin. In terms of the text's form, Kakutani calls Tartt's prose "supple" and "decorous."^[12]

Often lying about his working-class past in order to fit in with his wealthier classmates, Richard conforms to the lavish lifestyles of his peers. Richard is the only student on scholarship in his social circle, which pressures him to conform with his classmates to the point of idealization. This is successful, considering his eventual mobility in the group as a trusted peer after Bunny's death. However, this closeness later leads him further along the path of what Kakutani calls "duplicity and sin."^[12]

Limited to Richard's perspective of his classmates, readers follow his gradual discovery of their true motives. At first, Richard finds the five students alluring and elite, but he learns of their heinous acts and acts of moral corruption as events unfold and their secrets are revealed.

Richard is drawn to the five Classics students due to their air of mystique, exclusivity, and aesthetic appeal, but, by the end of the novel, he has realized their true natures. Bunny, initially portrayed as charismatic and friendly, is later revealed to have been blackmailing his peers. Henry is initially portrayed as cold but inherently compassionate but later shown to be near-sociopathic in his plots to murder Bunny and hide the crime. Francis seems aloof and confident to Richard at the start of the novel but is later overtaken by bouts of anxiety and worry. Camilla, initially portrayed as innocent, is later revealed to be deeply calculating, and Charles, first portrayed as kind and amicable, later spirals into drunken violence and chaos.

Considering the influence of his teachings on the students, Julian's character is also a source of disillusionment in the novel. Initially portrayed as an arcane yet assuring mentor figure with a wide breadth of knowledge, after learning his students were responsible for Bunny's murder, he flees the country without warning.

The book received generally positive reviews from critics. Michiko Kakutani called the novel "ferociously well-paced entertainment", which "succeeds magnificently" and heavily attributed the success of the book to Tartt's well-developed writing skills.^[8] Sophie McKenzie, writing for The Independent, called it "the book of a lifetime", stating that it was "perfectly paced" and the characters are "fascinating and powerfully drawn".^[13] However, James Wood of the London Review of Books gave it a mediocre review, writing: "The story compels, but it doesn't involve...It offers mysteries and polished revelations on every page, but its true secrets are too deep, too unintended to be menacing or profound."^[14] Critic Ted Gioia wrote:

There is much to admire in Tartt's novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt's decision to tell the story from the perspective of one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story could easily come across as implausible—or even risible—in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont college campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us she does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into the psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History.^[15]

The novel has been optioned by several filmmakers in the decades since its release for a possible film or television adaptation; however, all have been unsuccessful.

Producer Alan J. Pakula first acquired film rights at the book's publishing in 1992 but put the project aside to work on The Pelican Brief and later The Devil's Own. He returned to The Secret History in autumn 1998, with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne hired to write the screenplay, and Scott Hicks to direct. However, Pakula's death in a November car accident caused the project to be abandoned.^[16]

The 2002 publication of Tartt's second novel The Little Friend caused a resurgence of interest in The Secret History. A new adaptation was announced by Miramax Films, to be produced by Harvey Weinstein and headed by Jake and Gwyneth Paltrow, who hoped to star as the characters Charles and Camilla Macaulay respectively. The unexpected death of the siblings' father Bruce Paltrow in October of that year caused the project to be shelved again, and the rights were reinstated to Tartt.^[17]

At the 2013 publication of Tartt's third novel The Goldfinch, interest in another adaptation was rekindled, this time for television with Tartt's school peers Melissa Rosenberg and Bret Easton Ellis at the helm (Ellis is the novel's co-dedicatee). This attempt also fell through after Rosenberg and Ellis failed to find financial backers interested in the project.^[16]

Tartt's unhappiness with the 2019 film version of The Goldfinch caused some to speculate she would not allow further screen adaptations of any of her novels, making a future project based on The Secret History unlikely. Tartt fired her longtime agent Amanda Urban over the film and stated, "Once the book is out there, it's not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn't any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging."^[16]

Hampden College is based upon Bennington College, where Tartt was a student between 1982 and 1986.^[18]

Between 2019 and 2021, journalist Lili Anolik interviewed old Bennington classmates of Tartt's and found that several characters are based quite vividly upon real people: the character of Julian upon Bennington Classics professor Claude Fredericks, Henry upon Todd O'Neal, Bunny upon Matt Jacobsen,^[19][20] and Judy Poovy upon Michelle Matland.^[21] According to O'Neal, the novel is "a work of thinly veiled reality—a roman à clef."^[19] According to O'Neal, "Claude considered it a betrayal—not a personal betrayal so much as a betrayal of his teachings. He wouldn't talk to Donna for years."^[19]

At 1980s Bennington, there were students playing at the aesthetic of BBC's 1981 TV series Brideshead Revisited, which the book also draws upon. Charles is inspired by both classmate Mark Shaw and Brideshead Revisited character Sebastian Flyte.^[20]

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Secret History.

• NPR: Talk of the Nation: Donna Tartt interviewed by Lynn Neary (November 5, 2002)
• NPR: Talk of the Nation: Donna Tartt and Anne Rice interviewed by Ray Suarez (October 30, 1997)