alias Grace

Alias Grace is a historical novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, first published in 1996. It won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it fictionalises the murders that took place in Canada West in 1843.

Grace Marks was a servant in the household of Thomas Kinnear when Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, were killed. She and James McDermott, another servant, were convicted of the crime; McDermott was hanged and Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment, and her case became one of the most argued-over in the province. Atwood builds the novel around a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who comes to the penitentiary to study her as a case of criminal behaviour and finds himself drawn into her account of her own life. He wants the story to be consistent with the mild, composed woman he interviews, and the harder he looks the less the two versions of Grace Marks will sit together.

The book is assembled from letters, journal entries and Grace's own narration, and Atwood first met the case through Susanna Moodie's writing about the province, a debt she acknowledges in the novel.