The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood talks sequel The Testaments, and return to Gilead
- Everything in The Handmaid’s Tale has happened or could happen, she says. She didn’t expect to write a sequel because she didn’t expect the rise of Donald Trump
- Feminism, resistance movements, Game of Thrones – whatever the subject, the Canadian writer is knowledgeable. She even apologises for being ‘too erudite’
From a park bench on the Victoria College campus at the University of Toronto, Margaret Atwood – class of 1961 – looks back at the beginning of her career as an author.
“It was here that I decided to become a Victorian [literature student] at a time when it wasn’t at all fashionable. They were considered gauche, kitsch, sentimental, absurd,” she says, remembering the times she would dash back and forth across the park to take English classes on one side and history and philosophy on the other. “But the foundations of women’s equality – John Stuart Mill, those kinds of thinkers – were Victorians and the position of women was a real hotbed topic, extending all the way from proper undergarments to higher education.
“One of my cherished facts is that women weren’t allowed into classical art schools because they might see naked women,” she adds with a laugh. “What a shock!”
Atwood is among the world’s most celebrated authors and most famous Canadians, but on this humid afternoon she is undisturbed by passers-by, beyond a few who momentarily turn their heads at the woman in the dark sun hat and blue buttoned shirt.
Just months shy of her 80th birthday, the long-time Toronto resident has otherwise never been more noticed. She has written the year’s most anticipated novel, The Testaments, the sequel to her classic The Handmaid’s Tale and a Booker Prize finalist.