Lady Oracle

Lady Oracle, a 1976 novel by Margaret Atwood, predates some of her more famous books, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin. It tells the story of Joan Foster, a woman with an overactive imagination who writes pulp Gothic romance novels, and whose life mirrors the over-the-top twists and turns of the genre.

When the book opens, Joan Foster has just faked her death and escaped from her native Toronto to Terremoto, near Rome. She is miserable, constantly missing her husband, Arthur, whom she has left behind, and is perpetually paranoid that someone is going to find her. She had come to Terremoto with Arthur the year before and fears she will be recognized. The rest of the novel is recounted in flashbacks, with occasional returns to Joan’s situation in Italy and interspersed with excerpts from her Gothic pulp novels.

She starts with her childhood, which is unhappy due to a distant and neurotic mother, who openly despises Joan for being overweight. Her father is an anesthesiologist who is said to be killing people for the government in the war and doesn’t come back into her life until later. As she grows older and begins to understand how people see her, she embraces her obesity and begins overeating specifically to spite her mother. She is bullied and tormented by other children, and eventually learns to make friends by being the unthreatening and unassuming “fat friend.”



Her only comfort as a child is spending time with her Aunt Lou, a vivacious and quirky woman who is overweight herself and who takes Joan on fun excursions. During one of these, they go to see a spiritualist who says Joan has a unique gift and suggests she try automatic writing — a supernatural act where you allow spirits to take over your body and write for you. Joan gives it a go, but becomes scared and gives up.

Aunt Lou dies and leaves behind a sizeable inheritance, but stipulates that Joan can only access it if she loses one hundred pounds. Joan tries to do this but fails. She notices that her mother, despite having criticized her weight her entire life, does not support her in this attempt and that the weight was never the issue. Eventually, Joan leaves home without the money and travels aimlessly around Canada for a while, using her aunt’s name at hotels so her mother can’t find her. When she succeeds in losing the weight, she visits a lawyer, collects the money, and flees to London.

In London, she soon meets a man she calls the Polish Count when she falls from a double-decker bus, and he helps her ice her ankle. Joan lies to him about her past, saying she is a worldly art student, and he decides to keep her as a mistress. The Polish Count is a wealthy banker and a writer of nurse romance novels. Joan does not have strong feelings for him, but stays with him for a few months, nonetheless. During this time, she becomes interested in history and starts writing Gothic romances for the Count’s publisher under the name Louisa K. She starts to worry that the Count may be a threat to her and leaves him.



She then meets Arthur, a fellow Canadian and a radical leftist protesting the nuclear bomb, and falls for him. He does not demonstrate great feeling for her, but they end up moving in together. Once again, Joan lies about her past, inventing a popular and happy childhood. One day, she thinks she sees her mother sitting in her flat’s couch before the vision disappears. She receives a phone call from her father saying her mother is dead and returns to Canada, where she just misses the funeral. Freshly out of money and unable to return, she tries living with her father for a while but cannot connect with him. She sends letters to Arthur, but he never replies.

One day, Arthur shows up at her door. He had moved back to Canada himself and had not received her letters. They get married, and Joan is shocked to see the spiritualist she met as a child officiating her wedding, who again tells her to try automatic writing. Joan becomes increasingly frustrated living as a housewife, surrounded only by Arthur’s fellow radical political friends. She continues writing books to moderate success, but Arthur knows nothing of them. During a bad case of writing block, she decides to give automatic writing a go.

When she awakes, she has written a series of musings and poems. She sends them to a publisher, who loves them and hails her as a unique, revolutionary feminist voice. The collection is published under the name Lady Oracle and is a hit. Despite commercial and critical success, Joan remains unsatisfied and feels constantly watched. When she says in an interview that she wrote the book using automatic writing, she is sensationalized as a mystical figure. Meanwhile, her marriage to Arthur is strained as he seems resentful of her success.



Joan goes on book tours to promote her collection and during these, starts a secret affair with a performance artist called the Royal Porcupine. She ends it when a man called Fraser Buchanan tries to blackmail her with knowledge of the affair. Following the split, she starts receiving threatening messages. Scared and paranoid, she decides to fake her death with the help of a couple of Arthur’s friends, telling them that she needs to escape the government due to their anti-establishment activities.

Back in Italy in the present day, Joan discovers that the friends who helped her fake her death are under investigation for her murder. Returning to Canada and confessing is the only way to save them from a prison sentence. Still constantly paranoid about being found, she attacks a man who shows up at her door, who turns out to be a reporter who tracked her down. The novel ends with Joan thinking about whether to return to Canada and looking at the man as a possible way out of her misery.

An early novel in Atwood’s celebrated career, Lady Oracle already displays themes that would come to define her writing, such as the woman writer and female identity in a male-dominated world. Joan fails to develop a stable sense of self throughout her life, choosing instead to be whatever the men she encounters want her to be. As a result, she is constantly unsatisfied and perpetually afraid of the truth catching up with her. The plot follows some conventions from the pulp romance novels that Joan writes, including Gothic themes of paranoia and spirituality and a hapless, tormented heroine falling into the arms of a succession of men who ultimately bring her no happiness.