Tale of our times

BLESSED be the fruit - dystopian epic The Handmaid's Tale is back on screen with the final bloody rebellion against the regime of Gilead, where women capable of bearing children are enslaved by religious elders.

- BY EMMELINE SAUNDERS and SIOBHAN MCNALLY

Fans will be clamouring to discover what happens to June Osborne - the handmaid formerly known as Offred - since her escape from the fictional theocratic authoritarian state.

But while the popular TV drama offers a horrific fictitious version of the future, Margaret Atwood - the author of the 1985 book that inspired it insists all the disturbing storylines have already been lived by millions of women throughout history.

In 2019, Atwood, now 85, visited her archive at the University of Toronto and rediscovered the newspaper clippings and notes she had jotted down while researching for her novel.

"This is just stuff I came across when reading newspapers and magazines," she said. "I cut things out and put them in a box in case someone said, 'How did you make this up?"

"As I've said about a million times, I didn't make it up. This is the proof, everything in these boxes."

Atwood studied the 17th-century American Puritans at Harvard University, which inspired much of the novel, especially the New England-style Quaker clothes worn by the handmaids and their white bonnets, while Gilead's network of spies and informants, known as Eyes, are a nod to the hysteria of the Salem witch trials.

PARALLELS

The author said in 2017: "Totalitarianism always has views on who shall be allowed to have babies."

But Jessica Cox, author of Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth Century Britain, said we don't even need to look to brutal regimes for evidence of women being the property of men. She explains: "My book is set in 19th-century Britain.