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What it argues
Alias Grace is based on the historical case of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant servant who was convicted in 1843, along with stable hand James McDermott, of the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada. McDermott was hanged; Grace received a commuted sentence and served thirty years in prison. The novel takes place in 1859, when a young American doctor named Simon Jordan visits Grace to conduct interviews aimed at determining whether she is innocent, guilty, or — the most unsettling possibility — simply unable to remember.
The novel is constructed around an irreducible ambiguity. Grace narrates her own life in meticulous, seductive detail — a fatherless childhood in Ireland, a horrific sea voyage, years of domestic service, a close friendship with a fellow servant named Mary Whitney who dies badly — but the events leading directly to the murders remain, at the narrative's center, a blank. Grace may be suppressing the memory, may be genuinely amnesiac, or may be lying throughout with extraordinary skill. Atwood will not resolve this for you. The novel is constructed to prevent resolution.
What it gets right
- 1.
Grace's account of herself is so carefully calibrated to her audience that the novel becomes a study in how women learn to manage the expectations others project onto them.
- 2.
The novel does not answer whether Grace is guilty. Atwood has said explicitly that she does not know either. The ambiguity is not a withheld answer but the actual point.
- 3.
Dr. Jordan is a portrait of a certain kind of Victorian male intellectual: genuinely well-intentioned, scientifically modern, and still unable to see Grace as anything other than a case to be solved.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist and one of the most celebrated writers in the English language. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, The Blind Assassin (Booker Prize, 2000), Oryx and Crake, and The Testaments (Booker Prize, 2019). She has written poetry collections, short fiction, and critical essays. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has received numerous honorary degrees. Alias Grace, published in 1996, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction.
