A Guide to Dark Academia
The clocks have gone back in the UK, bringing the darkness earlier and earlier as we creep into the winter. The rain is coming down, there’s a shiver in the air and all I want to do is hunker down by candlelight and read a book.
Aside from the incoming festivities, the last few months of the year remind me of those rainy days spent combing the library for books on Virgina Woolf and long evenings huddled at my desk, wrapped in three layers of blankets, planning and writing essays next to a steaming hot chocolate.
It’s Dark Academia season, witches.
While Dark Academia has been around since the early nineties - it’s literally as old as I am - it’s had a resurgence recently with the help of TikTok and I am living for it. Though as with every aesthetic and genre, there’s an unwritten set of guidelines as to what defines it. And that’s where I come in jazz hands.
Dark Academia isn’t just a literary genre, it’s a whole aesthetic. There are themes and tropes and topics that relate to it, but there’s also a style and an atmosphere.
the fit
It’s all about tweed, sweater vests, layering, dark large print plaid, turtle necks and dark, moody colours. Think bundling up to sit in a chilly lecture theatre, teaching Shakespeare or the Greeks; cosy but structured. I define the Dark Academia aesthetic in terms of clothing that I would wear if I were waif thin and wandering around Yale on a crisp November morning clutching a pile of library books to my chest.
the setting
Novels that fall under the Dark Academia umbrella are usually set in, unsurprisingly, an academic setting. Whether it be a school, a college, or a boarding school, there is usually education and learning and a narrow focus on a particular discipline. The most frequent subjects are drama, art, Shakespeare, the classics and English Literature.
the characters
The players of Dark Academia are a dark and shady lot. They’re complicated souls with truckloads of baggage, more secrets than can feasibly fit in a person and some unexpected darkness, and yet these weirdos are utterly compelling and I usually end up loving them all anyway.
the atmosphere
When you know a genre well you start to build up an expectation of what that books is going to feel like to read, and none more that Dark Academia for me. I expect to spend so much time in icy cold libraries, dorm rooms and lectures with the protags that I feel a little cold myself, I want to feel submerged in a cloying but fascinating mystery, secret or betrayal, and I want to feel the need to race to the end of the novel to find out what happens, but also to savour each page and never leave this dark, sumptuous world.
Are you a Dark Academia fan? Did I get this right?
Written by Sophie
