Aunt Lydia is one of the narrators of the story. She is one of the Founder Aunts in Gilead and was largely responsible for the creation of the women’s sphere in Gilead. Secretly, she has been working to destroy Gilead from the inside, providing Mayday operatives with information to aid the Underground Femaleroad, which smuggles Handmaids and other dissidents out of Gilead. Aunt Lydia is a consummate manipulator and must constantly work to maintain her position. She engineers the infiltration by Nicole into Gilead so that she can bring out the cache of incriminating information that will cause the collapse of Gilead. Once her plan is successful, Aunt Lydia commits suicide by a morphine injection before the Angels capture her.

Lydia was born into a poor, uneducated family and had to work tirelessly to put herself through university and law school. Before the Gilead coup and destruction of the United States, Lydia was a family court judge. Under the new regime, Lydia quickly learns that to survive, she must cooperate. She implements the skills she used to climb up the ladder of the judicial system, namely shrewdness, manipulation, and wits. Morally, she believes in civil rights and justice, but her instinct for self-preservation, which she calls her “third eye,” causes her to make choices that she secretly finds repugnant.