Alias Grace

Sarah Robertson is an associate editor of the Canadian Book Review
Annual.

In 1843, a 16-year-old domestic servant named Grace Marks began serving
a life sentence in the Kingston Penitentiary for her involvement in the
murders of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and Nancy Montgomery, his
housekeeper and mistress. Grace’s fellow servant, James McDermott, was
found guilty of the Kinnear murder and hanged. Public opinion was
sharply divided on the question of Grace’s role in the murders.
Reflecting 19th-century gender stereotypes, she was both demonized as a
ruthless femme fatale and romanticized as a helpless victim.

Margaret Atwood’s masterful and richly symbolic fictionalization of
the life and times of Grace Marks is concerned not with Grace’s
relative guilt or innocence (“The true character of the historical
Grace Marks,” observes Atwood in her afterword, “remains an
enigma”), but with the process by which the case became a cause
célиbre and with the agendas and motivations of those who had a vested
interest in it. As the story opens, Dr. Simon Jordan is engaged by a
group of Grace’s supporters to help her recover her apparently
repressed memories of the murders. What Jordan senses but is unable to
articulate is that Grace the individual has been subsumed by

the public Grace. In relating her life story, she performs the role of
“celebrated murderess,” a strategy that confounds the doctor’s
search for the truth almost as much as her psychological opacity.

More than an absorbing murder mystery, this book is brilliant social
history. In addition to giving exquisitely concrete expression to
Grace’s life of domestic servitude, Atwood provides a compelling
portrait of the class system that dominated social relations during the
period, and of the often confused and turbulent relationships between
men and women. Her characters seamlessly embody mid-19th-century
theories of mental illness, public fascination with spiritualism, and
medical interest in somnambulism, “neuro-hypnotism,” and the
significance of dreams. Alias Grace is a remarkable achievement.