The Handmaid's Tale: The Books vs the Hulu Series

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is one of the defining novels of the twentieth century. The Hulu adaptation (2017–2024) extended the story far beyond the novel’s ending across six seasons — and in doing so, became a separate creative entity from the book.

The Novel

The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Gilead — a theocratic totalitarian state that has replaced the United States. The narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid: a woman whose sole function is reproduction for her assigned Commander’s household. The novel is taut, claustrophobic, and written in a voice that is simultaneously constrained and revelatory.

The structure includes an epilogue — “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale” — set centuries in the future, treating Offred’s account as a historical artifact. This epilogue recontextualises everything, providing both hope and irony that the main narrative denies.

The novel runs to approximately 300 pages. Read it in one or two sittings if you can — the unbroken immersion is part of how it works.

The Sequel: The Testaments

The Testaments (2019) is Atwood’s direct sequel, set fifteen years after The Handmaid’s Tale and told through three narrators including Aunt Lydia. It won the Booker Prize jointly with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.

The Testaments is more plot-driven and narratively conventional than the original — intentionally so. Where The Handmaid’s Tale is closed and suffocating, The Testaments opens outward. Both approaches are valid; the sequel is a companion rather than a replacement.

The Hulu Series vs the Novel

The series’ first season (2017) closely adapts the novel. After that, the show goes its own way.

Season 1: Closely follows the book. The production design for Gilead — the red cloaks, the white wings — became instantly iconic. Elisabeth Moss’s performance as June (Offred) is extraordinary. The ending diverges slightly from the novel but not significantly.

Seasons 2–6: Original material. The show makes June a more active agent of resistance than the novel allows — Offred in the book is primarily a witness; June in the show repeatedly acts and survives in ways the novel’s logic wouldn’t sustain. This choice is divisive: some viewers find it empowering, others find it implausible given Gilead’s brutality.

The show’s Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) becomes far more complex than the novel version — and The Testaments in some ways bridges the gap between novel-Lydia and show-Lydia.

What the novel does that the show can’t:

• Offred’s voice is the novel. Her irony, her memory fragments, her precise observations about language and control — these are the substance of the book
• The ambiguity of Offred’s fate (resolved in the TV show, left open in the novel’s main text) is central to the novel’s meaning

What Order to Read and Watch

For most readers: read the novel first, then watch the first season. The Testaments can be read at any point after the novel.

The later seasons of the show are best understood as a parallel story — related to but independent of Atwood’s books.