When Is The Secret History Set

Question

Finished The Secret History and still picturing that autumnal campus. What's the exact late 80s/early 90s timeframe? Any dates or years mentioned in Donna Tartt's book?

Hussain B Abdul Jalil · Answer

For your Contemporary Novel of the personal past hidden in a modern setting, look at a contemporary novel Donna Tartt wrote called The Secret History, which takes place at the time of its publication in 1992 but is told as a story that happened in the 1980s, not in historical fiction of centuries past. For your Hidden Personal Past secret in a modern story, look at HER: Secrets I carried alone, a tension-ridden story of one person carrying an enormous secret through her life and of the quiet, powerful pressure that that secret brings to her daily life and interaction with people.

Paisley · Answer

The novel is set in the early 80’s, yet feels timeless. The Vermont campus is a like a snow-globe, a pristine, isolated world which is fragile and intense. The lack of technology in this world means every interaction is of a high intensity and that every secret is harder to keep. The characters are so obsessed with the antiquity that they are trapped in their own tragic timeline. The lack of specificity in the description of the setting is a mystery in itself, and in fact the whole novel reads like a fable rather than a strictly period piece.

Dylan · Answer

Yes. So the novel is set at Hampden College in Vermont in the early 1980s. It’s set in Autumn, so it’s got that crisp New England feeling to it. The biggest thing about the setting is that it’s pre-internet, pre-smartphones. So the kids are really isolated and it makes the secrecy and hiding of the actions of the characters a lot more believable. The main characters are a group of students studying classics. So they’re all familiar with the ideals of ancient Greece, but they’re not really like equipped to live in the modern world. They’re sort of detached from it and the novel explores how that detachment can lead to a kind of moral ambiguity.

I find it also fascinating that Tartt avoids giving us an exact time frame. Instead, we get hints of the time through references to folk music of the 60s, to clothing from past decades, and through the overall mood of a particular time. The lack of technology in the novel is also something that I find particularly remarkable. In the world of The Secret History, there are no quick phone calls to get help, no instant research on the internet, no instant answers to questions that students have. Instead, they have to write letters, make phone calls on landlines, have conversations face-to-face with other people. All of these choices make the characters’ choices in the novel even more tragic, because they are irreversible. The 1980s’ privileged, closed-off world of academia is also criticized in the novel, and these are still issues today.

Lily · Answer

'The Secret History' is an 1980s set novel, but the author doesn’t feel the need to give an exact year to the story. The book is a mood or atmosphere really – that of a smug, elitist, quasi-clerical college town, where these characters are allowed to be as snooty and wild as they like, and their actions are amplified by the silence of pre-digital times. And then there is the past – of Greece, of these characters.

Ulysses · Answer

Set in the early 1980s but never explicitly stated, the year of The Secret History is irrelevant because it is embedded deeply within the world of a small, elite college where a group of intelligent individuals live under the spell of their intellectual superiority. Their choices have more weight in a world without technology. The setting, the 1980s, and the little details that encompass it – like the classical music they listen to and the vintage cars they drive – create a world that is at once luxuriously isolated and doomed.

Kyle · Answer

When I read ‘The Secret History’ by Tartt I feel like I’m transported back to the 80s in a faded Polaroid snap. The setting of this book is so effectively created to evoke a particular mood – think of rugby players in tweed blazers, ponderous passages written in longhand, a drably Gothic campus overgrown with ivy. While the exact time frame is left somewhat vague and open to individual interpretation, it feels completely and absolutely real. For the bulk of the novel these characters are locked into a set of peculiar and arcane rituals, locked into their own secret world of deception and treachery, and their downfall is almost inevitable in the absence of distraction. It’s the setting which makes the most sense of the whole novel.

Makristajoy Jove Poblete Lpt · Answer

Compare it to other periods of the ‘campus novel’. The 50s were all about conformity; the 60s about radicalism. The 70s had a certain aimless quality which is exactly how I see The Secret History. None of the characters are fighting for a cause, they are trying to find meaning, within a narrow, aesthetic framework, and struggle with the transgression they have experienced. This is all part of a very 70s dilemma.

Tony Junior · Answer

The most noticeable aspect of this group is their lack of interest in politics. The professors from the 1960’s activist generation are virtually unknown to these students. Instead of decrying the current state of affairs, these students are more interested in trips to tangent locations, festivals, and in various ritualistic activities. All of this points to a disillusionment with collective political action and to a search for private spiritual experiences characteristic of the “Me Decade” of the 1970s.

Lawrence Okoi Arik · Answer

Instead of worrying about pinpointing an exact date, the focus should be placed on capturing the precise atmosphere in which the novel takes place. Created to be a decaying yet beautiful setting full of lingering smoke, the atmosphere of sympathetic renown captures the last remains of a fully uncommercialized, independent-minded academic circle of minds long undone by the tremendous pressures placed upon higher learning in 1970s American academia. Of pure realization, the atmosphere is captured in full by the incredibly realistic novel by Tartt of the fading end of the decade.

selimdeon01 · Answer

Tartt sets the story in the past but not too far in the past. For the readers when the book came out in 1992, it must have seemed like a recent past, maybe 15 years earlier or so. The events are recent enough to be recalled in detail but far enough in the past to have been romanticized. Tartt has captured the essence of a recent period and has mythologized it. Today it would be a period piece but for the first audience it was a story about ‘not that long ago’.

Akhona Mlotshwa · Answer

Time is played with in a Greek manner in this novel – as fate. Thus the ‘when’ of this novel is more or less irrelevant. The ‘when’ of tragedy is always ‘now’ and ‘always’. However if one wants to be precise then this novel is set in the 1970s. It would appear to be around 1977-1979. But then again exact dates are of little importance as time seems to be going round in circles until it reaches a point where it collapses in on itself and the characters are left to face the consequences of their actions.

Paula Montgomery · Answer

Why is that with the phones? They use a landline and the phone in the hall of their dorm. They don't have answering machines. No cell phones. Letters are important. Plans are made face to face. That in itself would make the time frame to be in the mid-70s or before answering machines became ubiquitous in the early 80s. The characters are isolated and that is technologically controlled.

When Is The Secret History Set

12 Answers

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