Alias Grace
by Margaret Atwood

List Price: $14.00
Pages: 468
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0385490445
Publisher: Anchor

The poet and novelist Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, November 18, 1939, and educated at the University of Toronto, Radcliffe College, and Harvard University. Drawn to writing from an early age, Atwood began to publish her poems when she was 19 and brought out her first book of poetry, Double Persephone, in 1961. She continued writing while teaching English literature at various universities in Canada (1964-72) and as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto (1972-73). Atwood is best known for her novels The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Life Before Man, Bodily Harm, The Handmaid's Tale, and Alias Grace. She has lived in Boston, Vancouver, Montreal, and London, and has traveled extensively. She currently resides in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson and their daughter Jess.

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A Letter from Margaret Atwood

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt!"

--from "The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood, 1843

Dear Reader,

The central figure in my novel is Grace Marks, one of the most "celebrated" women of her generation, having been convicted of murder in 1843 at the age of sixteen. How did Grace enter my imagination?

As a child in the 1940s I learned in our school reader about Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant who over a century ago settled in the Canadian backwoods. She was unsuited to pioneer life and wrote about her experiences, including the fire that took her log cabin, in Roughing It In The Bush. I myself had grown up in cabins in the north, so the image of the fire was an anxiety-producing one for me. After I became a writer, I had a vivid dream about Susanna Moodie. I dreamt I'd written an opera about her--unlikely, as I could barely read music. I was impressed enough by my own inner life to get Moodie's books out of the library, and in her second book, Life In The Clearings, I found Moodie's version of Grace Marks, as she describes her meeting with Grace in the Kingston Penitentiary and dramatizes the double murder for which Grace was convicted. She also recounts a later meeting with Grace in the Lunatic Asylum; there her account ends.

Years passed and Grace Marks continued to wander around in my head. I wrote a script about her for a television play. More time passed and she kept insisting on being given a fuller hearing, so I began to write this novel. Was Grace Marks the cunning female demon many considered her to be--or was she simply a terrorized victim? I began researching, not only the murder case but life in Victorian times. Every major element in the book was suggested by something in the writing about Grace and her times, however suspect such writing might be; in gaps left unfilled, I was free to invent. Since there were a lot of gaps, there is a lot of invention.

My readers always ask how much personal experience I put into my books. I can truthfully say I've never murdered anyone or run away with the hired man, as she did. But there is one bit of autobiography: the laundry. When I lived in the north of Canada the laundry was done in washtubs, with the water heated on a wood stove, and when I was Grace's age, much of it was done by me. Grace's pleasure when she has a line of clean white washing flapping in the breeze comes straight from the heart. As for the pieced quilts, they too are autobiographical: my grandmother in Nova Scotia had a large supply of them. I tried to sew one once but it was too much for me.

In fact, the novel itself at times seemed almost too much for me; I found myself wondering where the parsnips would have been stored, wrestling through the details of Victorian domestic and prison life. But I finally made it to the end. And so now it's your turn. I invite you to meet Alias Grace. May she stop wandering around in my head, and perhaps wander around in yours for a while.

Best wishes,

Margaret Atwood


An Interview with Margaret Atwood

In her bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood masterfully took us to a chilling world of the future. In her astonishing new novel, Alias Grace, she just as convincingly takes us back 150 years and inside the life and mind of one of the most notorious women of the 1840s. Grace Marks is serving a life sentence for her part in the vicious murders of Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy land owner who employed her as a maid, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. James McDermott, who was hanged for the murders, accused Grace in his confession of leading him on and promising sexual favors in return for the murders, but Grace herself claims to have no memory of the killings. Weaving together sex, violence, the burgeoning science of psychiatry, and a good old- fashioned mystery, Atwood has created a novel--and recreated an era--of mesmerizing power.

Doubleday spoke with Margaret Atwood in Ireland, where she is finishing up some "odds and ends" and plunging into her new novel.

Q: Many of the characters in Alias Grace, including Grace Marks, are historical figures. How did you first discover this story?

MA: I came across it a long time ago when I was writing a series of poems about one of the people who makes an appearance in the book--Susanna Moodie, who wrote the story down. But she wrote it, as she says, from memory, and she got a lot of it wrong, as I found when I went back to the actual newspapers of the time and went into things such as the prison records. It always bothered me that the story Moodie told was so theatrical. It made you wonder, could it really have been like that? And when I went back to check, in fact, it wasn't. She had done a certain amount of embroidery.
Q: How did you determine when to stick to the facts, and when to fctionalize?

MA: When there was a known fact, I felt that I had to use it. In other words, I stuck to the known facts when they were truly known. But when there were gaps or when there were things suggested that nobody ever explained, I felt I was free to invent. For instance, Mary Whitney was the name that appears as Grace's alias in the picture that accompanies her confession, but none of the commentators ever mentions a thing about it. Although people at the time may have set down a version of events, you can't actually go back and question them. And they leave out the things that you would most like to know. People don't have the consideration to foresee that you might be interested in this stuff 150 years later.
Q: What was the most challenging bit of history for you to find?

MA: The most difficult thing I had to discover was at the very beginning--I tried to find Thomas Kinnear. It turned out there were two Thomas Kinnears, and one of them would have been about seventy- three years old at the time of the murders. I figured it couldn't have been him-- otherwise you wouldn't have had the steamy element of the story, with Thomas Kinnear having a mistress who was his housekeeper, and some people feeling that he was also flirting with Grace. So I went looking for him, and I couldn't find his grave or Nancy's grave, although I knew where they were supposed to be buried. I discovered that they really were buried there, but in unmarked graves. I did finally trace Kinnear back through the Scottish end, and it appears that he was the half brother of a man who lived in Scotland. But the Burke's Peerage listing for the family shows Thomas as dying in the year when he turns up in Canada. In other words, it's the age-old English point of view that going to Canada is the same as death. It's also true, however, that Scottish families often felt that it was as scandalous to be murdered as to do the murdering, and the Kinnears may have tried to cover up the murder.
Q: How reliable was the news coverage then?

MA: Very unreliable. Sort of like now when a story first broke what you got is what you get now, which is rumor. In this case, there was a great deal of speculation about who had murdered Kinnear. At first they thought that one of the murdered people had done it, because they hadn't found Nancy yet. They thought she had run offwith the two other servants and that if they could find her, they would know the truth. But then they did find her, and she was dead.

So there was a lot of speculation about that; there was also a lot of editorializing, with political factions taking different points of view. That is, the very conservative ones were against Grace Marks, and the reformers were more for her; in their eyes, she was a victim. So you've got two quite distinct points of view, as well as a lot of digressions. People were talking about letting too many immigrants in--sound familiar?--and the need for better letters of reference for servants.
Q: Has the growth of TV journalism improved or decreased the reliability of the news?

MA: You will always have biased points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge. Also, there's the very human need to shape a story and make it mean something. One person telling the story may have one spin on it and another person may have quite a different one. You saw that a lot in the O. J. Simpson trial. And it's particularly evident when it's a matter of a crime. When a crime has been committed, opinions get extreme.
Q: How differently do you think Grace would have been treated today--psychiatrically and judicially?

MA: It would be a very different kind of trial. Today you would have expert witnesses. There weren't any then, you didn't have any of that at all . And certainly psychiatry as we have it today was not recognized as a science in the same way then. There were medical practitioners who were interested in it and people who were studying mental conditions, but there was nothing like the kind of establishment we have today.
Q: Grace often felt that people were curious about her less because she was a "celebrated murderess" than McDermott's "paramour. " What role did the Victorian attitude toward sex play in her treatment?

MA: About the same as it would now. She certainly was celebrated, by the way. People went to see her the way you would go to see the elephant in the zoo. In those days you could visit prisons and insane asylums as a tourist attraction. People would go to the prison and say,"Here I am, and I'd like to see Grace Marks. " And she would be trotted out for them to look at.

The question is, would they have been as interested if there hadn't been a sex angle? Well, probably not, same as now. The big question for them was: Did she or didn't she? And there were things to be said on either side. For instance, although she had run off with McDermott, when they got to the tavern in Lewiston, they had separate rooms. It was generally assumed that it was that kind of relationship, but Grace is not on record anywhere as having said so.
Q: In your afterword, you write that the attitudes people had toward Grace "reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of woman. " What do you mean by that?

MA: One group felt that women were feeble and incapable of definite action; that is, Grace must have been compelled by force to run away with McDermott and that she was a victim. Other people took the view that women, when they got going, were inherently more evil than men, and that it was therefore Grace who had instigated the crime and led McDermott on. So you had a real split between woman as demon and woman as pathetic.


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Excerpted from Alias Grace © Copyright 2008 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with permission by Anchor. All rights reserved.

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