Charlie Jane Anders on How A.S. Byatt’s Possession Paved the Way for Dark Academia

People constantly name The Secret History by Donna Tartt as the foundational text of dark academia—but A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece Possession was published two years earlier. Possession is the novel that shaped the way I (and many other writers I know) think about how to write a story of academic pursuits. It’s a thrilling literary detective story, a dual romance in two time periods, and a deeply thoughtful look at the tension between privilege and curiosity.

When I first read Possession, I was an undergraduate at Clare College at Cambridge University, where I read English literature—perhaps the most dark academia setting imaginable. I literally read books while sitting on long narrow boats with an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph, a bottle of wine and some friends.

Though I was already primed for liking the novel since I’d grown up around academia thanks to my college-professor parents, I saw my own passion for delving into the meaning and origins of poetry and fiction reflected in this book, and felt as though Roland and Maud were fellow travelers.

In the novel, Roland, a failed-professor-turned-researcher, uncovers a scrap of a letter that hints at a secret affair between two fictional Victorian poets: Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. He enlists the aid of a LaMotte scholar named Maud Bailey to uncover the truth.

I loved the parallel romances between the two poets and the two scholars, and the treasure hunt for documents which slowly make sense of the complicated texts written by equally complicated people. Rather than separating the art from the artist, Roland and Maud slowly discover how both Randolph and Christabel reflected their actual lives in their work.

Byatt uses poetry as an important driver of the story, and her fake Victorian poetry is shockingly good—better than a lot of actual poetry from the era I’ve read. (I’m looking at you, Swinburne.)

I recently reread Possession because my new novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster had developed a burgeoning subplot about uncovering the secrets of a fictional novel from 1749 named Emily. As I wrote and revised, the literary detective story became bigger and bigger, occupying a more prominent place in my novel.

Jamie, my protagonist, uncovers clues to the identity of Emily‘s anonymous author, thanks to a scrap of paper in an archive, but this just opens up more questions. Those questions, in turn, lead to cryptic pamphlets hinting at a buried scandal, sending Jamie deeper into a long-ago mystery.

I reached for a model of how to pull off such a tricky mixture of historical fiction and academic intrigue. And I found myself clutching my old copy of Possession, and falling even deeper in love than the first time I’d read it.

I came to realize that Possession might not fit the strictest definition of the ultra-popular dark academic genre, because it’s missing key elements such as opulent secret societies and hidden violence. That said, Byatt does have a lot to say about privilege and money, and the lengths to which people will go to get ahead in academia. And maybe the fact that our dominant narrative about higher education has no room for a book like Possession says something pretty dark about our attitude to learning.

Possession is not a glamorous book—nobody lounges around ornate rooms in elegant clothes, drinking sophisticated drinks. Instead, it’s all frayed carpeting, overcooked food, threadbare sweaters and showers without quite enough water pressure. The real England, in other words, the land of “mustn’t complain.”

And yet, there absolutely is a secret society in Possession: it’s made up all of the people who have devoted their lives to these obscure Victorian poets. Every new scrap of information about Ash and LaMotte is greeted with an astonished rapture.

The real luxury, in Possession, is eloquence and insight: absolutely everyone, even the non-academic characters, speaks in gorgeous literary allusions and thinks deeply about the meaning of stories—even, perhaps especially, the characters who insist that they don’t care about such things. Possession makes book nerdery seem glamorous and sexy.

The book also casts a gimlet eye at wealth and privilege in the person of Mortimer Cropper, the Randolph Ash scholar from New Mexico who uses his massive funding to monopolize all artifacts related to Ash. There’s also Blackadder, the professor that Roland works for, who’s more of a beleaguered figure but who does have a lot of institutional power.

Roland also has a third foil: Fergus Wolff, a more successful scholar and playboy who’s an archetypal fuccboi. The aristocrats we meet are terribly impoverished—like the distant descendants of Christabel we meet at one point – and the only money is new money.

Even with all its grubby realism, Possession celebrates a life in books in a way that feels aspirational. Meanwhile, many of the books at the center of contemporary dark academia represent my worst fears about higher education: that it’s just about status and privilege, that it only exists to confirm someone’s membership in the upper classes. That there is no longer any room for the love of learning for its own sake.

In a world of student loans and ever-increasing housing costs, the notion of devoting all of your time to obsessing over the meaning of nineteenth-century poetry does indeed feel like more of a fantasy than witchcraft or demons.

My novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster ended up having the influence of Possession woven through every strand of its DNA. Not just the bookish scavenger hunt, but also the culture of people speaking and thinking in literary allusions and textual analysis. And the constant awareness of how disappointing the world of universities and colleges is in real life, and how challenging it is to hold onto the love of literature and the humanities, and yet how rewarding those things can be.

How we write about academia, and how much we allow ourselves to romanticize the pursuit of knowledge the way Possession does, says a lot about how we think about higher education. And this matters now more than ever, during a time when universities are dismantling their humanities programs and being pressured into pandering to authoritarian strongmen.

I can’t help addressing this duality in Lessons in Magic and Disaster, as my protagonist Jamie struggles with whether she still belongs in academia. She wonders if she’ll have any chance at finding a decent job, but also whether there’s any point in being part of a system that is designed to churn out hedge-fund managers and privileged jerks.

Everyone has a slightly different definition of dark academia, but Possession left me with a strong attachment to stories where making sense of writing from the past, and uncovering what lies behind it, are central to the story. I’m way more interested in a literary detective story than in a campus murder mystery—and I think Possession shows the way to make stories about scholarship as thrilling as any adventure.

Though I wish I could have conjured an ending to my academic subplot as reassuring as that in Possession, where Roland finds his career rejuvenated; that didn’t feel as plausible in 2025, and Jamie winds up deciding: “Money turns everything thoughtful into shit.”

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Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders is available via TOR.