The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

Science fiction

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First published: 1985
Print length: 350 pagesEveryman's Library, 2006

Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, 1985

Description

In near-future New England, Gilead has overthrown the United States and established a patriarchal, totalitarian military theocracy. The regime arose after the Sons of Jacob assassinated the U.S. president and much of Congress. Offred is assigned to serve as a Handmaid, expected to bear children for powerful men within this rigid social order. Through her experience, the novel examines women’s powerlessness, the suppression of reproductive rights, and resistance to authoritarian control. Margaret Atwood’s story centers the human consequences of a state that organizes political and religious power around control of women and reproduction.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Lyrical · Spare

Pace

Measured

Tone

Dark · Reflective · Tense · Unsettling

Structure

Framed · Nonlinear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Ideas

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

FreedomGenderOppressionPolitics and ideologyPowerReligion and faith

About Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic whose work moves between speculative fiction, historical narrative, satire, and mythic revision. She often builds stories from voices that are constrained, compromised, or competing, making narration itself part of the struggle over power. Her prose can be spare and atmospheric or densely layered, with dry wit sharpening its attention to gender, class, language, and political control. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s account renders an authoritarian theocracy through the restricted knowledge of a woman assigned to reproductive service. Alias Grace turns interviews with a convicted servant into a contest between measured testimony and a psychiatrist’s demand for explanation. Blind Assassin expands this method through memoir, newspaper reports, and a novel within the novel, each layer revising the others. Elsewhere, Atwood directs the same scrutiny toward biotechnology and social collapse in Oryx and Crake, and toward inherited myth in The Penelopiad, where Penelope’s defense is interrupted by the maids’ disruptive chorus.

Series

The Handmaid's Tale · Book 1

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Everyman's Library
Language: English
ISBN: 9780307264602

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