Kate Elizabeth Russell’s debut novel My Dark Vanessa was published in March 2020 and quickly made its way to the New York Times bestseller list. A psychological thriller, the novel recounts the experience of a 15-year-old girl who has a sexual relationship with her male English teacher. Russell has acknowledged that her own experiences inspired parts of the novel, the title of which is an allusion to Vladimir Nabokov’s poem-novel Pale Fire. This study guide refers to the 4th Estate paperback edition by HarperCollins published in the UK in 2021.

Content Warning: This study guide summarizes and analyzes depictions of sexual abuse and assault.

Plot Summary

The novel opens in 2017 as 30-year-old Vanessa Wye refreshes her Facebook page over and over as she gets ready for work. Later, Vanessa makes her way to a hotel lobby in Portland, Maine, and takes her position at the concierge desk where she works. During a break, she receives a call on her cell phone from a man named Jacob Strane.

Strane reveals that his employer, a school called Browick in Norumbega, Maine, is reopening an investigation into Strane’s relationship with a former student named Taylor Birch who has accused Strane of sexual assault. Within months of this conversation, Strane takes his own life, unable to cope with the public exposure after other accusers come forward. With the help of her therapist, Vanessa faces the possibility that she has more in common with Taylor Birch than she is comfortable admitting. Seventeen years earlier, Strane was Vanessa’s 42-year-old English teacher. As an adult, Vanessa is certain that their relationship is the most important, passionate love affair she has ever experienced; by the end of the novel, she begins to understand that their relationship was abusive and that she, like Taylor Birch, was a victim of sexual assault.

The novel alternates between events in 2017 and during the Vanessa’s earlier life from the years 2000 to 2006. Readers accompany the younger Vanessa through the trials of boarding school life, starting with her sophomore year at Browick. She is a scholarship student, which enhances her sense of herself as an outsider, and she struggles with relationships within her peer group and with her parents. Strane, an astute observer of human nature and an experienced predator with a penchant for young, clever, vulnerable female students, uses literature to connect with Vanessa, a talented poet. His emotional openness and vulnerability give Vanessa a false sense of agency, which she lacks in other areas of her life. She is also, however, ambivalent about Strane. At times, his age and his needs disgust Vanessa, but the power he has over her is something she has never experienced.

When rumors of Vanessa’s relationship with Strane circulate amongst the student body at Browick, Vanessa covers for Strane and leaves Browick at the end of her sophomore year in shame. She attends her local high school for two years before going to Atlantica College, where she becomes infatuated with her English professor, a man in his 30s named Henry Gould. Again, literature is a powerful force through which Vanessa believes she can communicate with Henry, but he has no sexual nor romantic interest in Vanessa. When Vanessa realizes that Henry does not reciprocate her feelings, she is humiliated and abandons her love of literature for a series of unfulfilling administrative jobs.