Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

‘Alias Grace’ by Margaret Atwood is based on the true story of Grace Marks, a servant convicted of the notorious double murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper and mistress Nancy Montgomery alongside stable hand James McDermott in Toronto in 1843 when she was just sixteen years old. McDermott was hanged for attempting to flee from Canada to the United States, while Grace was sentenced to life in prison at Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario after her death sentence was commuted at the last minute. Despite admitting to the crime at the time, Grace claims she has no recollection of the murders fifteen years later. Dr. Simon Jordan, an American psychiatrist, is investigating her sanity at the request of a liberal minister who believes she is innocent.

Atwood's historical fiction output is limited in comparison to her dystopian novels, but she faithfully recreates the complex structure and slow denouement of gothic novels of the era, with a style that is neither overly archaic nor jarringly modern. Actual newspaper accounts of the crime and written confessions are interwoven with correspondence, poetry, and the perspectives of both Grace and Dr. Jordan. The patchwork quilt motif that appears throughout the chapter structure and in trying to piece together the available evidence is very well done. Grace's family immigrated to Canada from Ireland when she was twelve years old, in 1840. Grace and her siblings were left in the care of their abusive father after their mother died during the ship crossing, and she later found work as a maid. In addition to the events leading up to the murders, the novel addresses several other topics through Grace and Dr. Jordan's meetings, including prison conditions, the early development of psychology as a medical and scientific study, and, most importantly, the role of poverty and gender in society.


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There is still much uncertainty about Grace's role in the crime - she is said to have given three very different accounts of what happened - and Atwood handles this ambiguity deftly all the way to the end. Atwood acknowledges in the afterword that the written accounts are so contradictory that there is very little information that is unequivocally "known" to be true. Her fictional account of events fills in the many blanks, resulting in a sharply nuanced portrait of one of the era's most complex and mysterious mysteries of life.

The upcoming Netflix adaptation of 'Alias Grace,' which will be released later this year, will hopefully bring more attention to one of Atwood's most satisfying novels, more than two decades after it was first published. It is definitely one of my favorite of Atwood's six novels that I have read so far.











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