To which ancestor did Margaret Atwood dedicate the novel?

Margaret Atwood dedicated The Handmaid’s Tale to her purported ancestor Mary Webster.

Webster was a seventeenth-century woman in Puritan New England who was accused of witchcraft. In 1684, she was hanged in Hadley, Massachusetts, but survived and was cut down. Atwood’s dedication invokes this extraordinary story of persecution and survival.

The family connection is not completely certain. Atwood has explained that her grandmother sometimes claimed Webster as an ancestor and sometimes denied the connection. That uncertainty is why “purported ancestor” is more precise historically, but Mary Webster remains the canonical answer to the trivia question.

Atwood also dedicated the novel to historian Perry Miller, whose scholarship on Puritan New England influenced her. That second dedication can cause confusion, but Miller was not an ancestor.