Alias Grace
First edition cover
|
|
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Dante Gabriel Rossetti (painting), Kong (first edition design) |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical fiction |
| Publisher | McClelland & Stewart (first edition); Bloomsbury Publishing PLC (first U.K. edition) |
|
Publication date
|
September 1996 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 470 |
| ISBN | (first edition); (first U.K. edition) |
| OCLC | 35936659 |
Alias Grace is a novel of historical fiction by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Canadian Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The story is about the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. Two servants of the Kinnear household, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the crime. McDermott was hanged and Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who researches the case. Although ostensibly conducting research into criminal behaviour, he slowly becomes personally involved in the story of Grace Marks and seeks to reconcile his perception of the mild mannered woman he sees with the murder of which she has been convicted.
Atwood first encountered the story of Grace Marks in Life in the Clearings by Susanna Moodie. In 1970, she published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a cycle of poems informed by the published works of Mrs. Moodie. It became a classic of Canadian literature, as it lyrically evokes the experience of life in the wilderness, immigrant life, and colonial times. Subsequently, Atwood wrote the 1974 CBC Television film The Servant Girl about Grace Marks, also based on Susanna Moodie’s account. However, in Alias Grace, Atwood says that she has changed her opinion of Marks, having read more widely and discovered that Mrs. Moodie had fabricated parts of her third hand account of the famous murders.
Grace Marks, the convicted murderess, was hired out from prison to serve as a domestic servant in the home of the Governor of the penitentiary. A Committee of gentlemen and ladies from the Methodist church, led by the minister, hopes to have her pardoned and released. Grace cannot remember what happened on the day of the murders, and she exhibits symptoms of hysteria, so the minister hires Dr. Simon Jordan, an alienist, to interview her, hoping he will find her to be a hysteric, and not a criminal. An arrangement is made so that Dr. Jordan will interview Grace during afternoons in the sewing room in the governor’s mansion.
...
Wikipedia