Margaret E. Atwood

When Susan E. Milmoe began living with her Radcliffe graduate school roommate—a woman whom everyone called “Peggy” back then—Milmoe was unaware that she wrote poetry.

Peggy wrote “behind closed doors,” Milmoe said, despite having already published a few poems in Canadian literary journals back home.

Little did Milmoe and her other roommate know that the “Peggy” who read their Tarot cards and cooked them meals would become literary legend Margaret E. Atwood.

“If I had realized she was going to be famous, I certainly would’ve paid more attention,” Milmoe joked.

During their time as roommates, Milmoe considered Atwood and her soon-to-be husband, Jim Polk, to be “house parents” and remembered Atwood as a “wonderful cook” who would often listen to her roommates’ quandaries, both academic and romantic.

Today, Atwood is considered one of contemporary literature’s most noteworthy figures, having published over fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction, and having received several notable accolades.

Though Atwood’s time at Radcliffe was littered with obstacles—from gender-based discrimination to cut-throat competition within the English department—she was, and has remained, an unfailingly positive and patient woman.

“You would get the impression, reading some of the novels, that she’s depressive, but that is not at all the case,” Milmoe said. “She’s very much, in my opinion, a ‘lemonade out of lemons’ sort of person.”

When Atwood arrived at Radcliffe in 1961, Harvard had only just begun to admit female graduate students. Women made up only about a quarter of the student body at Harvard, Milmoe recalled.

It was not until 1963—just one year after Atwood received her master’s degree in English—that Radcliffe women were granted Harvard diplomas.

Along with Milmoe and another roommate, Atwood lived in an apartment on Harvard Street while studying at Radcliffe. Though Atwood may not have been affected by the gender-based dormitory segregation of the time, attending Radcliffe still meant facing what Nathalie Cooke, author of “Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion,” called “a man’s world.”

At that time, women were not allowed to enter Lamont Library, making Harvard’s poetry collection inaccessible to Atwood—an obstacle that, Milmoe said, was “quite a deprivation for Peggy.”

In Atwood’s Victorian Humor course, women had to serve the class tea and cookies during break time.

“Radcliffe must have seemed very different indeed from that atmosphere of her childhood, or that of Victoria College...where she completed her undergraduate degree,” Cooke wrote in an email. “Both were worlds that empowered women.”

Atwood’s interest in gender issues—which would later manifest in her poetry, essays, and fiction—was evident during her graduate studies, according to Atwood’s former classmate Lloyd Schwartz.

Schwartz, who now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston, remembered working on a short silent film with his roommate in which Atwood starred.

In the film, a professor wages a revolution with his students, who summon each other to battle with a ram’s horn.

One sequence featured three couples in bed. Of the first two couples, the male members roused themselves from bed to join the battle. Of the third, however, the woman rose to take up arms, leaping from bed and driving off on a motorcycle.

That woman was Atwood.

“Even then, we knew that there was something kind of more adventurous and tougher and more potent about Peggy Atwood than a lot of other women who were graduate students,” Schwartz said. “Peggy was one of those people who really did stand up for her self-respect and power.”

In coming to Radcliffe, Atwood entered an English department that her fellow student Richard M. Dyer recalled as being “very competitive.”

According to Dyer, the department admitted 100 graduate students but only kept 30 of them. In a departmental meeting, students were told to look to their left and right because the people around them were not likely to be there next year, Dyer remembered.

Along with Dyer, Atwood worked as a grader for an English class on the bildungsroman taught by professor Jerome H. Buckley, a man who would later become an adviser and friend of Atwood. Atwood worked as a grader, rather than a teaching fellow, because her Canadian visa prohibited her from getting a work permit.

Though faced with obstacles, Atwood was able to demonstrate her talent for language and writing during her time at Radcliffe.

“We all knew she was talented and vibrant and interesting,” Dyer said. “But I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted what she evolved into.”

Atwood earned her master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1962 but decided to leave Harvard before finishing her doctoral dissertation.

Harvard, however, has remained a source of inspiration for her writing. Her time at Harvard is particularly evident in her feminist novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a book set in Harvard Square that aims to make a statement about contemporary gender relations.

For Atwood, writing is a way to combat the challenges—like those she faced at Radcliffe—of everyday life.

“Writing is an act of hope,” Atwood said upon receiving her Radcliffe Medal in 2003. “However gloomy the content of the writing may be, the mere act of putting pen to paper is an act of communication; it presupposes a future reader, and thus a future.”

—Staff writer Gina K. Hackett can be reached at ghackett@college.harvard.edu.