The Book of Night Women

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of enslavement, sexual violence, torture, and murder, including the abuse and death of children.

Lilith is the protagonist of the novel. She is the child of a young enslaved woman and Jack Wilkins, an overseer at Montpelier who raped her mother. Lilith is a product of her environment. She is fierce, angry, and funny. She endures the horrors of her life under slavery and tries desperately to find love. She refuses to let other people tell her what is right. Her identity contains and reveals many of the contradictions of slavery. Her childhood is spent trying to understand why she is a woman and no longer a girl, why she is Black with a white father, and why she feels anger and hatred alongside relentless hope. Within the confines of slavery, all her desires, feelings, and thoughts feel somehow wrong. Her anger leads her to violence, which haunts her constantly as she does precisely what she hates white people for doing. Her empathy leads her to complicity, passively agreeing to the conditions of her imprisonment. Her desire for love leads her to care for a white man who gave her the