Amidst the fresh romantic comedies and dark academia, other, older books lurk on video hosting social media service TikTok. With users discovering seminal classics by the likes of Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath and Edward Powys Mathers and telling the world what makes them so special, we thought the time was ripe to investigate the online resurgence of some classic authors and their works.
TikTok – and its subcommunity BookTok – has transformed the way that many of us consume literature, with content creators providing pithy, insightful and hilarious reviews of a seemingly endless number of books. Spikes in sales of everything from romantic comedies to dark academia to self-help manuals have been directly attributed to the platform’s immense influence and many of its leading lights have gone on to become household names.
But BookTok isn’t just about discovering and making exciting contemporary authors; it can also introduce whole new generations to authors who were writing their best-known work decades – even centuries – ago. The brain-bendingly fiendish whodunit Cain’s Jawbone, written in 1934 by cryptic crossword afficionado Edward Powys Mathers, became an unexpected bestseller in 2021 after a popular TikTok user detailed their attempts to solve the murder mystery by rearranging the book’s pages on their wall. More recently, #kafkatok has trended worldwide after hordes of lovelorn users discovered Franz Kafka’s impossibly romantic correspondence to his lover Milena Jesenka. In this article, we take a closer look at how TikTok has taken seminal authors from the past to its collective heart.
Franz Kafka
The world has Max Brod to thank for bringing Franz Kafka to literary prominence. Ignoring his friend’s requests to destroy all his work upon his death, Brod instead published the lot and saw the brooding Bohemian novelist and short story writer’s reputation rise over the coming decades. Even so, the tortured Modernist may appear an unlikely candidate for social media heartthrob. But, whilst his 1915 novella The Metamorphosis attracts a good deal of attention on TikTok, it is his lyrical, soaring love letters to his muse Milena Jesenka that have recast him in the role of beautifully doomed dreamboat for the Digital Age.
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Yearning, lyrical and deeply romantic, this collection of Franz Kafka's love letters to his muse and lover Milena Jesenka provides profound insight into the soul of one the twentieth-century's greatest writers.
Jane Austen
It would, of course, be crazy to attribute Jane Austen’s phenomenal popularity solely to TikTok but one look at the spate of romcom reworkings and updates that have been boosted by the community is testament to the enormous love felt for the pioneering Regency author online. From Ibi Zoboi’s Pride to Sonali Dev’s The Emma Project, Austen’s perfectly constructed Marriage Plots continue to be an endless source of inspiration.
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Impeccably crafted and trailblazing in its celebration of female wit, Austen's arguably greatest novel follows the courtship of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy whose initial dislike of one another matures into mutual respect and admiration.
Edward Powys Mathers
In hindsight, a near-impenetrable murder mystery based on a genius gimmick makes total sense as a TikTok blockbuster. But when an obsessed user literally deconstructed their copy of 1934 whodunit Cain’s Jawbone – as per author Edward Powys Mathers’ instructions – the sensation the act caused caught just about everyone by surprise. Who knows what the cryptic crossword setter, also known as Torquemada, would have made of his new-found fame but a follow-up volume collecting some of his most head-scratching puzzles, The Cain’s Jawbone Book of Crosswords is out in September.
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First devised in 1934 by the cryptic crossword compiler Edward Powys Mathers (aka. Torquemada), Cain’s Jawbone is a fiendishly difficult literary puzzle where seemingly random pages must be set in their one correct order to reveal a labyrinthine murder mystery.
Oscar Wilde
As an arch-aesthete and proto-celebrity, Oscar Wilde would no doubt have adored TikTok – or at the very least made extremely shrewd use of it. Revelling in decadence, sin and moral torpor, The Picture of Dorian Gray’s wickedly addictive story of the eponymous hedonist’s double life and decaying portrait remains tantalising, scandal-ridden reading for online booklovers.
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Wilde’s alluring, evergreen adult fairy-tale explores what happens to the young, hedonistic protagonist’s soul as he realises his attractive appearance liberates him from moral bounds.
Sylvia Plath
When British actor and all-round national treasure Bill Nighy was snapped reading The Bell Jar on the London Underground in 2022, it sparked an online frenzy with many BookTok-ers seeing it as confirmation of the Love Actually star’s sensitivity and intelligence. Plath’s devastating novel is a key feminist text, chronicling aspiring writer Esther Greenwood’s descent into depression and mental illness as her ambitions are consistently thwarted by the misogyny of post-war America.
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Plath’s seminal novel about a young female writer’s ambitions and experiences amidst the impermeable misogyny of 1950s society moves from razor sharp humour to stunning insights into depression and mental illness.
Emily Bronte
Another author whose incendiary work met with wildly polarised contemporary reactions, Emily Bronte dared to confront topics such as domestic abuse, loss of religious faith and challenges to conventional ‘morality’ in her sole novel Wuthering Heights. The fact that so many of these themes are still hugely relevant in today’s society may well account for much of the novel’s popularity on TikTok, although the gothic atmosphere and wild, windswept romanticism of its central characters is also a fundamental part of its allure.
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Detailing Cathy and Heathcliff’s self-destructive relationship amidst the wild, feral atmosphere of the Yorkshire moors, Emily Bronte’s sole published novel evokes the violence of doomed romance like no other work of literature.
Albert Camus
Whilst The Plague gained traction on TikTok during the pandemic (for obvious reasons), the most enduring title by the French philosopher and author Albert Camus on the platform remains The Outsider (also known as The Stranger). Weaving absurdism and existentialism into a novella centred upon the recently bereaved Meursault, who kills an Arab man in Algiers, the novel’s themes of guilt and non-conformity continue to resonate with new generations of readers.
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An ever-topical meditation on non-conformity and the nature of guilt, Camus' existentialist masterpiece follows a man whose refusal to mourn his mother the way he is expected to sets off a tragic chain of events.
Virginia Woolf
Whereas other authors in this piece largely owe their standing on TikTok to one or two seminal novels that speak to the zeitgeist, Virginia Woolf’s entire oeuvre enjoys constant review, praise and tribute amongst the platform’s users. From the prescient issues of transgenderism and bisexuality raised in Orlando to the empowering feminist argument of A Room of One’s Own, and from the existentialism of Mrs Dalloway to the experimentalism of The Waves, the pioneering modernist remains an inspiring figure for many.
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Luminous and groundbreaking, Viriginia Woolf’s centuries-spanning masterwork follows the titular protagonist as they wake up in different sexes but as the same person at various points in history.
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