Beloved is written by Toni Morrison; a distinguished author of several bestselling novels. Morrison received the Noble Prize in Literature in 1993. She has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Review of Books calls Morrison “…a major figure in our national literature.”

In the Foreword Morrison describes the inspiration behind the story of Beloved. Relating her new- found feelings of freedom through the loss of her job; the story of Beloved was inspired by a real-life slave, Margaret Garner, who was jailed for killing her child to save it from returning to slavery. Freedom and slavery are the underlying themes of Morrison’s journey with Sethe and Beloved.

In Sethe, Morrison brings to life the woman slave who ran from Sweet Home, the farm of the demons of her past. Sethe’s longing to be with her children in Ohio led her to escape by herself in the last stages of her pregnancy. Sethe’s children were with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs who was legally free. Having arrived in Cincinnati with her newborn baby born en route, it took only 28 days for the slave master from Sweet Home to find Sethe. She knew what her children’s future would be like in slavery under the control of the evil schoolteacher.

Sethe’s only answer to survival in that moment was to kill her children. She believed being dead was better than being a victim to the torture of slavery. In the shed, Sethe killed her un-named baby girl and attempted to kill the other three. No longer valuable to him, the schoolteacher retreated leaving Sethe in the blood of her victims. Years later, the dead girl’s ghost was chased away only to return in human form as the nowgrown daughter named Beloved.