Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace is a fictional account of the life of the famous Grace Marks, accused and convicted of murder in Ontario in the mid-1800s. Using newspaper clippings and secondhand accounts of the incident, Atwood crafts a a powerful narrative of what it meant to be a woman in Canada in the 1850s, and uses Grace’s own voice and observations to widen the reader’s perspective as to the cruel judgments and sexism women faced, and are still facing, over 150 years later. A delicate mix of ghost story and medical mystery, Grace tells her own version of her life and of what happened, leaving others around her, and now her readers, unsure not only what the truth was, but what the word truth even really means.
Grace was born and grew up in Ireland, with an abusive father and a mother who died on the journey over to Canada. As soon as Grace was of an age to work, her father essentially kicked her out and then harassed her for the money she subsequently earned. Once Grace denied him the money, she never saw him or her siblings again. And so began her journey as a maid, in which she worked in quite a few different residences until she reached what would be the final one; where the murders occurred.
Grace was convicted of second degree murder and served almost 30 years of her sentence before being officially pardoned and given living arrangements in New York. She lived out the rest of her days quietly and under a pseudonym, many thinking that she served too much time, and only because she was a woman and women were judged more harshly and according to harsher stereotypes.
After reading the novel, which only took a few days because of Atwood’s ability to draw the reader in, I watched the Netflix series of the same name, based off of the book, and found it to be quite the same as the novel, which, for anyone who has ever read a book and then watched the movie or TV series knows, can be hard to find.
Up until the last episode of the 6-part series, the details from the book were repeated almost religiously, and even then, I can’t be sure if the few things that were different were a deviation from the book or simply the fact that my memory is terrible. I will say that reading the book was frightfully spooky (especially at night!), while the series had less of spook and more of quiet sensibility.
For anyone intrigued by stories of strong women and the perils they faced, Alias Grace is a superb choice.