Toni Morrison 3: Beloved
From Secret Life of Books by Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole
March 17, 2026 · 1h 13m · Episode 131
About this episode
Sophie and Jonty explore Toni Morrison's novel 'Beloved', discussing its originality and the depiction of Black experience through the lens of a haunting story inspired by true events.
Beloved , published in 1987, was Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and instantly seen to be an all-time landmark of American literature, winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Sophie and Jonty continue their Morrison series by asking what makes Beloved so original, how the novel sets out to depict Black experience as never before, and - a favourite topics on SLOB – what, really, is the ‘ghost’ that haunts the household in this novel? Beloved was inspired by the true story of the Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery in 1857. On being captured, Garner killed her young daughter to save her from a life of enslavement. At the time the story was a mainstream media sensation, used by abolitionists and pro-slavery voices alike. But in Morrison’s extraordinary retelling it becomes a deep, rich, hard to decipher tale of African-American lives and inner experiences of love, grief, pain and joy from the Middle Passage into the late nineteenth century. Set mostly in 1873, with numerous flashbacks, Beloved tells the stories of the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. A mother, her lover, her daughter, a ghost and a mysterious woman called Beloved who appears in…
People in this episode
Hosts: Sophie Gee, Jonty Claypole
Topics covered
- Toni Morrison
- Beloved
- Black experience
- slavery
- American literature
- ghosts
- African-American lives
Keywords
- Toni Morrison
- Beloved
- slavery
- Margaret Garner
- American literature
- ghost
- Cincinnati
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Beloved
Places: Cincinnati, Ohio
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