There's the looming red brick wall that encircles the Yard, dominating Offred's surroundings.

In Atwood's retelling, Harvard Yard is a center of political repression and violence.

The wall surrounds a secret police headquarters, and it regularly features the hanging bodies of political criminals.

"The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred at least," Atwood writes. "Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top."

And then there's the novel's climatic moment, set inside an eerily familiar Harvard Yard. Offred and her fellow handmaids witness a public execution in what appears to be Tercentenary Theatre. It is the only time Offred enters the Yard, and she is ironically summoned there by the same bell that reminds today's students of the end of each class.

"There's a wooden stage erected on the lawn, something like the one they used every spring, for commencement, in the time before," Atwood writes.

In what some critics have considered a throwback to Atwood's own days in Cambridge when at least some libraries excluded women, in the world of Gilead, women are forbidden from reading.

Atwood has warned against reading too much into the setting of various parts of her novel. Once asked to identify a particular scene of the novel, she responded instead with a joke.