York Notes for A Level: The Handmaid’s Tale includes features to help you achieve top grades, including extract analysis of key passages, to add extra in-depth information and also to demonstrate how to approach detailed analysis, a key skill in your exam. Students who can demonstrate this depth of understanding, linking out to contexts and critical interpretations, in their exam responses to The Handmaid’s Tale questions are likely to achieve a higher grade than those who comment on the novel in general terms. You might be asked, for example, to discuss the ways in which Offred strives for survival both physically and psychologically during her life in Gilead, or to discuss ways in which Atwood transposes seventeenth-century behaviour and beliefs into the late twentieth/early twenty-first century and the effect of this on the reader.