Caitlin Breeze on Dark Academia, Power and Privilege in The Fox Hunt

Dark academia’s allure lies in its beauty, secrecy and uneasy power dynamics. And few explore those tensions as sharply as Caitlin Breeze. In her latest novel, The Fox Hunt, she unpacks ambition, privilege and the seductive pull of elite institutions through a chilling academic mystery. We spoke to Caitlin about dark academia’s lasting appeal, writing toxic power structures, and why stories of belonging still resonate.

Dark academia continues to captivate readers year after year. Why do you think this genre has such lasting appeal?

Dark academia taps into a very human wish: to belong somewhere. There’s something seductive about the idea of walking into a grand old university and being instantly transformed by it. People don gowns, and recite rituals they barely understand over tables laden with candles and silver. It is perhaps as close as modern experience can take us to being inducted into magic.

Dark academia captures a longing not just for learning, but for entry into rarefied spaces. The thrill of aspiration alongside the anxiety of never quite feeling secure. Prestige is seductive precisely because it is conditional, parceled out through unspoken rules and inherited powers.

What draws readers in, I suspect, is that tension between beauty and unease. Dark academia invites you to love a place deeply while still holding it accountable. It lets us revel in the aesthetic – the glorious libraries, the cloisters, the intoxicating pursuit of brilliance – and yet also interrogate its cost, and our own desire to belong to it.

The Turnbull Club sits at the heart of the story. What was the inspiration behind creating it?

The first spark for Turnbull Club came from a disturbing anecdote, told to me by a friend. It was about one night at Oxford: a group of students who staged a human fox hunt, with the men cast as hunters and the women as prey. I couldn’t shake the image. In Britain, fox hunting is braided deep into ideas of inherited power, a pastime belonging to people who have never been told no.

I also drew on the history of Oxbridge dining societies: the ones with rituals of excess, freedom from consequence and a habit of producing the very people who later run the country.

What sets the Turnbulls apart is their attitude towards what their privilege entitles them to. They are utterly convinced of their own rightness. The Turnbull Club isn’t monstrous because it knows it’s wrong. It’s monstrous because it doesn’t believe wrongness applies to it at all.

The novel has a strong academic and historical atmosphere. What kind of research went into building the setting?

My undergraduate degree was at Cambridge, and I fell in love, quickly and irrevocably, with the university. The winding alleys, the glorious cloisters, the feeling of possibility and history at every turn.

Cambridge is full of tiny, atmospheric details that feel magical even before you add any fantasy: staircases worn down by centuries of footsteps, doors that open onto odd little courtyards, libraries that go on forever.

Traditions persist without origin stories. You wear academic gowns for dinner. You will be chosen to read Latin aloud to a hall full of people, whether you understand it or not. Ceremonies continue long after their meanings have blurred. There’s something inherently magical about that accumulation of history and oddity, even before you add literal enchantment.

Friendships in The Fox Hunt are shaped by ambition, secrecy, and competition. What interested you in exploring these dynamics?

At elite institutions, competition isn’t just academic; it’s social, economic, and generational. Some characters have been preparing for this world since childhood, while others enter it feeling like trespassers.

When lead character Emma meets the privileged, beautiful Jasper and his friends, she finds a world where friendship is often not just friendship. It’s mentorship, rivalry, camouflage, longing. Every relationship carries the weight of what isn’t spoken.

Emma enters this world as a disruptive force, precisely because her expectations of relationships do not include this grey area. For her, friendship means a genuine bond forged in kindness, trust and support. This draws some characters irresistibly closer and repels others, which in turn sets in motion the events of the book.

Many dark academia stories blur the line between loyalty and betrayal. How did you approach writing relationships where trust is constantly being tested?

I started by thinking about what each character really, truly, wants and what they’re afraid to lose.

Emma arrives at the University craving belonging so deeply that she overlooks the warning signs woven into Jasper and the Turnbull Club. That blindness felt painfully true to how trust sometimes works: when we offer it not because someone is worthy, but because we long for something they represent.

I was interested in the idea that betrayal doesn’t always announce itself as such. In environments built on hierarchy, harm can easily be reframed as tradition or necessity. People convince themselves they’re being loyal to a group, or a principle, even as they betray individuals close to them.

At its core, the novel examines power, privilege, and who gets to belong. What conversations did you hope the book might spark?

I hope this book encourages readers to see themselves as belonging, by right, in any of the spaces we’re taught are elite entry only. A love of learning is the best qualification for a place at the table anywhere in academia.

I also hope readers finish the book thinking about how privilege operates in ways we often take for granted. The Turnbull Club is a dramatic example, of course, but it’s rooted in real dynamics: inherited power, old boys’ networks, and the idea that certain people are simply ‘meant’ to lead.

The questions underneath are real enough: Who gets access? Who has to fight for it? And what kinds of behaviour get quietly forgiven when the person doing it has the ‘right’ background?