Synopses & Reviews
In this astonishing tour de force, Margaret Atwood takes the reader back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. In 1843, at the age of sixteen, servant girl Grace Marks was convicted for her part in the vicious murders of her employer and his mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders. As Dr. Simon Jordan - an expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness - tries to unlock her memory, what will he find? Was Grace a femme fatale - or a weak and unwilling victim of circumstances? Taut and compelling, penetrating and wise, Alias Grace is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that vividly evokes time and place. The novel and its characters will continue to haunt the reader long after the final page.
Synopsis
CA
About the Author
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939, and grew up in northern Quebec and Ontario, and later in Toronto. She has lived in numerous cities in Canada, the U.S., and Europe.
She is the author of more than forty books — novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children. Atwoods work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaids Tale and Cats Eye — both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride, winner of the Trillium Book Award and a finalist for the Governor Generals Award; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Governor Generals Award, the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Oryx and Crake, a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor Generals Award, the Orange Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Her most recent books of fiction are The Penelopiad, The Tent, and Moral Disorder. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans lOrdre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
From the Hardcover edition.
Reading Group Guide
1. This novel is rooted in physical reality, on one hand, and floats free of it, on the other, as Atwood describes physical things in either organic, raw terms (the “tongue-coloured settee”) or with otherworldly, more ephemeral images (the laundry like “angels rejoicing, although without any heads”). How do such descriptions deepen and reinforce the themes in the novel?
2. The daily and seasonal rhythm of household work is described in detail. What role does this play in the novel in regard to its pace?
3. Atwood employs two main points of view and voices in the novel. Do you trust one more than the other? As the story progresses, does Graces voice (in dialogue) in Simons part of the story change? If so, how and why?
4. Graces and Simons stories are linked, and they have a kinship on surface and deeper levels. For instance, they both eavesdrop or spy as children, and later, each stays in a house that would have been better left sooner or not entered at all. Discuss other similarities or differences in the twinning of their stories and their psyches.
5. Atwood offers a vision of the dual nature of people, houses, appearances, and more. How does she make use of darkness and light, and to what purpose?
6. In a letter to his friend Dr. Edward Murchie, Simon Jordan writes, “Not to know--to snatch at hints and portents, at intimations, at tantalizing whispers--it is as bad as being haunted.” How are the characters in this story affected by the things they dont know?
7. How and why does Atwood conceal Graces innocence or guilt throughout the novel? At what points does one become clearer than the other and at what points does it become unclear?
Discussion questions provided courtesy of Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
Author Q&A
Q: Many of the characters in Alias Grace, including Grace Marks, are historical figures. How did you first discover this story?A: 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. 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 fictionalize?
A: 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 appeared 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?
A: 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 differently do you think Grace would have been treated today—psychiatrically and judicially?
A: 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?
A: 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 women." What do you mean by that?
A: 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.
From the Paperback edition.