The Edible Woman Study Guide

Growing up primarily in Toronto, Canada, Margaret Atwood always knew she wanted to be a writer. She went on to earn degrees in English literature from both the University of Toronto and Radcliffe College, before beginning to publish poetry professionally. The Edible Woman was Atwood’s first novel. Around this time, she also married her husband Jim Polk, whom she would divorce five years later. Atwood then went on to publish a new piece of fiction every few years, including the Booker-Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and her landmark feminist work The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which imagines a dystopian society where women are valued solely on their fertility. In both her work and her personal life, Atwood is known for her activism on various issues, particularly surrounding women’s rights and the environment. Today, Atwood continues to write and teach at several universities across Canada and the United States. She lived with writer Graeme Gibson, a fellow Canadian, until his death in 2019.

Atwood wrote The Edible Woman at the height of second-wave feminism, a movement catalyzed in large measure by landmark texts like Simone DeBeauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s text in particular emphasized the ways society’s emphasis on marriage and childbirth could feel restrictive to women, becoming a rallying cry for housewives across the United States and beyond. As birth control became more readily accessible—and as more women got college degrees, like both Atwood herself and the novel’s protagonist Marian—feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem began to lead new discussions about sex and sexual violation, harassment, women’s rights in the workplace, and childcare. Second-wave feminist activism spanned the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal period in history that also saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the war in Vietnam. 

Stylistically, Atwood has cited several more fantastical writers as essential to her work. Edgar Allen Poe was an early influence on Atwood’s writing, while she credits mid-century writers like Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and John Wyndham (The Chrysalids) with inspiring some of the more speculative elements of her fiction. In terms of content, however, Atwood positions The Edible Woman as a work of “proto-feminism,” placing it in line with books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and other older texts, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Importantly, The Edible Woman also seems at one moment to directly allude to Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a more explicitly feminist (and anti-colonial) response to Jane Eyre.