@Cheerio I don't think I would have done justice to the book if I'd had to think about it for my A levels.
I don't think at that age I was thinking about this kind of thing in the same way as I am now.
I was thinking about the letters. Eden might not actually know the letters made it to Canada. I can't see Gilead advertising that, it won't be on their evening news.
They won't want people in Gilead to know Jezebels even exists, let alone that women are escaping or writing letters.
Also, perhaps the bulk of the refugees from Gilead have come in in dribs and drabs and have been processed in centres and I doubt most people were even aware of them in a personal way. They won't have been much on the news or in the papers in a way that mattered.
Refugees are arriving in places every day, including the UK, and we don't even hear about it on a daily basis, and if we do it's rare that we hear directly from the people themselves. We see their picture but we don't hear their voice.
But then all of a sudden a large volume of letters arrived, all in one go, all saying the same thing, and all over the internet just as a controversial visit was taking place. Headline news and all in the voices of the women who wrote them.
The general public will have heard from those women in a way they have never heard from the people who have arrived from Gilead in person. And it made a difference.