Magic in Academia: A Guest Post by Caitlin Breeze

Power comes at a price. At an elite university, students partake in a dark ritual that summons something beastly in this exhilarating tale. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Caitlin Breeze on writing Our Monthly Pick, The Fox Hunt.

I have always felt the magic in academia. The first whispers of The Fox Hunt began when I was studying at Cambridge University. Oh, I loved everything there. The shadow-bound libraries. The cloisters and secret gardens. The history whispering from every stone.

But elite institutions are built on exclusion as well as beauty. So, alongside my love, I was left with questions. About class. About who moves easily through these spaces. About how power reproduces itself, quietly and efficiently, in rooms lined with portraits of men who look very much alike.

Because universities like Oxford or Cambridge have historically been the training grounds of the nation’s most powerful men. Years later, a friend told me a story about some of them. In the shadow of Oxford University, they had held a human fox hunt. The male students styled themselves as hunters, chasing female students as foxes through the city. The image struck hard, and stayed: young men casting themselves as hunters, and women as prey. In a world already shaped by inherited privilege, it seemed a small step to imagine such rituals being tied to something darker and more literal. And I began writing.

Elitism, privilege, wealth. They are all systems we can’t see, channeling power. Another word for that, I realised, might be…magic.

And so I found myself imagining a university still thick with old magics and ancient privileges. A young woman who stumbles onto a secret society of powerful young men. Who discovers, lurking behind centuries of wealth and influence, a bargain that requires a sacrifice to work. But this heroine would refuse to be crushed between the jaws of that system. She would not remain prey. She would hunt.

Building the magical world of The Fox Hunt grew naturally from this setting. Ancient universities already feel uncanny at times. I remember walking through the courts of Cambridge at dusk and half convincing myself I could hear whispers in the walls. The echoes of a world beyond reach. It did not take much to imagine that magic might be stitched into the stone itself. And I wanted the magic in The Fox Hunt to feel like that: as though it had always been there, humming quietly beneath the stone floors.

And I wanted it to transform my heroine, to lead her into a world that glittered with enchantment and menace. In writing Emma, I loved exploring how a young woman might grow into her own power. How she might discover that however small she once felt, her actions can alter the world around her.

At heart, The Fox Hunt is my attempt to bottle that sense of stepping into the beautiful and unfamiliar. To invite readers into cloisters and candlelight, into whispering libraries and secret rituals, and to let them feel that same shiver of possibility. The sense that somewhere, just out of sight, there is always more magic than we think in the world. And there are always women brave enough to claim it.