Margaret Atwood followed this book with Cat's Eye in 1988. Some of the same concerns show up in the later book: a controversial painter returns to the city that she grew up in and runs into old friends and the memories of old friends. Marge Piercy has always been associated with Atwood, mostly because both write poetry and fiction from a feminist perspective. Piercy's book most like this one is Woman on the Edge of Time, her 1976 novel with some science fiction elements to It. The main character, confined to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue Hospital, must learn to behave the way that her oppressors expect of her, but she also travels in time to the future, to the year 2137, with a fellow inmate.

Critics examining The Handmaid's Tale's sinister view of the future often compare it to George Orwell's 1984, which...