Elite Traveler on MSN: Getting married? These exclusive bridal designers should be on your radar The couture ateliers, private salons, and bespoke houses creating six-figure gowns for brides. Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison.

Understanding the Context

Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Sethe, a formerly enslaved mother of four, grapples with her traumatic past. Get all the key plot points of Toni Morrison's Beloved on one page. From the creators of SparkNotes.

Key Insights

A short summary of Toni Morrison's Beloved. This free synopsis covers all the crucial plot points of Beloved. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining possession of her present--and to throw off the long-dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend with the unassailable truths of history. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Final Thoughts

Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison. Beloved, novel by Toni Morrison, published in 1987 and winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. The work examines the destructive legacy of slavery as it chronicles the life of a Black woman named Sethe, from her pre-Civil War days as a slave in Kentucky to her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873.