Aunt Lydia
Aunt Lydia trains Handmaids at the Red Center.
The book
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeAunt Lydia trains Handmaids at the Red Center. She presents coercion as protection and teaches women to blame the old world and themselves. Her voice remains inside Offred’s memory long after training ends, showing that indoctrination can become internal commentary. Her fate is not revealed in The Handmaid’s Tale; later books and television adaptations do not establish what happens to her in this novel.
If you like The Handmaid's Tale
If you like Margaret Atwood
Explore authors with a similar voice, perspective, and influence.
Simone de Beauvoir
French writer and philosopher whose novels, memoirs, and social analysis examined freedom, gender, responsibility, aging, and the material conditions that shape a life.
View author
Claude McKay
Jamaican-born poet and novelist, and one of the essential writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He arrived in Paris from Moscow in 1923 and stayed in France until 1928, writing Home to Harlem there — and forming a low opinion of the rich, white expatriate scene that dominates most accounts of the period. His Paris is the same years as Hemingway's and almost nothing like it.
View author
Henry Miller
The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.
View author