Character List

Beloved Sethe’s third child and oldest daughter who was killed at the age of two. Her restless spirit haunts the family first as a ghost and then as a flesh-and-blood woman. Denver Sethe’s fourth and youngest child. Traumatized as a young girl by what she discovers about her mother, she […]

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About Beloved

Morrison drew on a Cincinnati murder case arising from a woman’s sacrifice of her children to keep them out of the grasp of slave catchers. As Morrison saw it, slavery denied black mothers the right to feel maternal love and eventually made them ambivalent toward their own offspring, particularly those […]

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Book Summary

Sethe, a 13-year-old child of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home, an idyllic plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner, an unusually humane master, and his wife, Lillian. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, bears him three children. […]

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