Alias Grace

Is Grace Marks a murderess or an innocent pawn? Is she an evil fiend or mentally ill? Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) retells the story of Canada’s notorious nineteenth-century convicted murderess Grace Marks. Grounded in the historical record where available, Atwood’s historical fiction novel probes issues of gender and class roles, identity, truth, and the nature of memory.

Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy landowner, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress, are murdered in July 1843. Grace, who was working for Mr. Kinnear as a housemaid at the time of the murders, insists that she has no memory of the incident, though she was there at the house that day. She stands accused with James McDermott, who worked for Kinnear as a stable hand.

Barely 16 years old, Grace is convicted as an accessory to the murder of Thomas Kinnear and sentenced to death. Because of the pleading of her lawyer and sympathetic reform groups, Grace’s life is spared and her sentence converted to life imprisonment. James McDermott is also convicted, and he hangs on November 21, 1843.

In 1859, a young, ambitious, up-and-coming American medical doctor,

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