ABOUT THE BOOK

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution. Beloved is a dense, complex novel, mixing past and present, destined to become a twentieth-century American classic.

'Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed,
Ms Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear
to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about
her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist,
of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest'
Margaret Atwood, New York Times Book Review

'This is a huge, generous, humane and gripping novel...
It is a magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece'
A. S. Byatt, Guardian

'She melds horror and beauty in a story that
will disturb the mind forever'
Sunday Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Toni Morrison was born in Ohio in 1931. She studied English and Classics at Howard University before receiving a master's degree from Cornell University in 1955. After teaching at, among others, Texas Southern University, she became a senior editor at Random House Publishers and began writing journalism.

She is now one of the most acclaimed living American writers. The bestselling Song of Solomon won the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1978, and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Her appointment by President Carter to the National Council on the Arts in 1980 was closely followed by her election to the American Academy and Insitiute of Arts and Letters. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. You know, my mother would walk down to a theatre in that little town that had just opened, to make sure that they were not segregating the population -- black on this side, white on that. And as soon as it opened up, she would go in there first, and see where the usher put her, and look around and complain to someone. That was just daily activity for her, and the men as well. So it never occurred to me that she should withdraw from that kind of confrontation with the world at large. And the fact that she was a woman wouldn't deter her. She was interested in what was going to happen to the children who went to the movies -- the black children -- and her daughters, as well as her sons. So I was surrounded by people who took both of those roles seriously. Later, it was called "feminist" behaviour. I had a lot of trouble with those definitions, early on. And I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote "Sula," really, based on this theoretically brand new idea, which was: Women should be friends with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really "sisters," in that sense.

Salon.com, 1998

STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION

1. Beloved has many elements often found in ghost stories - the haunted house, the vengeful spirit, the hostile community. What distinguishes Beloved from the generic ghost story?
   

2. What does Beloved have to say about the community - its value, its demands, and the relationship of individuals to it?

3. In what ways does Paul D stand out from the other male characters? Does the novel offer a consistent view of the relations between men and women in this period of black American history?

4. In the early pages of the novel, the spirit world and the material world seem almost indistinguishable. What sort of boundaries exist between the two? How does the belief in a spirit world affect the lives of the characters?
   

5. How much of a 'person' is Beloved? Given her mysterious arrival and unexplained departure, does she have any reality other than an embodiment of other people's emotions, e.g. Sethe's guilt?

6. The narrative of Beloved is fragmented, with point-of-view switching between characters and moments in time - yet a sense of order is very much in evidence. What other devises does Toni Morrison use to shape the novel?
   

OTHER BOOKS BY TONI MORRISON

The Bluest Eye
Sula
Song of Solomon
Tar Baby
Jazz

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

The Color Purple ~ Alice Walker
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings ~ Maya Angelou
Their Eyes Were Watching God ~ Zora Neal Hurston
Native Son ~ Richard Wright
Joy Luck Club ~ Amy Tan

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