Recommendations from our site
“It’s a book about the divide between the land of slavery and the land of freedom, which winds up insisting that there’s not much of a divide after all. The long arm of slavery asserts itself from Kentucky into Cincinnati, where the main character has escaped, and where slave catchers find her. Instead of going peaceably back to the plantation where she was enslaved, she kills her child and freaks out, causing the slave catchers to shrink back. The legacy of all that she fled comes back, as the slain child comes back, in a ghostly form, to haunt her life. “This is not a story to pass on,” the book says towards the end, and yet it does.” Read more...
“Morrison had always thought the story of enslavement was too large to take on, but the story of Margaret Garner engaged her imagination and inspired the novel. She was intrigued with the thought of infanticide as an example of excessive maternal love under the duress of the terror of enslavement. In a sense, she wanted to interrogate what kind of love would drive a mother to engage in such an act, and what the consequences for her emotional life might be. The novel looks at enslavement primarily from a woman’s perspective, in contradistinction to the perspective in familiar slave narratives, written primarily by men, like Frederick Douglass. “ Read more...
Marilyn Mobley, Literary Scholar
“Beloved was Morrison’s fifth novel. It’s a gripping story, inspired by a famous abolitionist case, the true story of a woman who runs away from slavery with her children, but when the slave catchers catch up with her, she kills one of her own and tries to kill the others, rather than returning them to slavery.” Read more...
The Best African American Literature
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Literary Scholar
“I was shocked by the blunt force of its subject matter and its exquisitely torqued prose. It remains one of my most adored novels.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
