Alias Grace.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

By Margaret Atwood. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Alias Grace, by Canada's premier novelist, is a retelling of the story of Grace Marks, a notorious Canadian criminal who, in the 1840s, was convicted of murder at the age of sixteen. Thomas Kinnear, an upper-class Canadian bachelor, and his lover/housekeeper Nancy Montgomery were killed on July 23, 1843. Nancy had previously given birth to an illegitimate child and was pregnant with Kinnear's baby at the time of her death. Grace Marks, Nancy's pretty young assistant, and James McDermott, another servant in the Kinnear household, ran away to the United States after the murder, and the two were presumed lovers. They were captured shortly after their escape, accused of the murders, and brought to trial early the following November. Because of the sensationalistic nature of the case, Canadian and American newspapers covered it extensively, and Grace Marks became a cause celebre.

Only the Kinnear murder was tried. Since both Grace and McDermott were found guilty and condemned to death, it was deemed unnecessary to try the Montgomery case. McDermott was hanged before an immense crowd on November 21, and before he died he accused Grace of masterminding the crime. However, due to the efforts of her lawyer and a nucleus of upstanding citizens, Grace's sentence was commuted to life, and she was incarcerated in the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston.

From the beginning Grace polarized public opinion. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of intense interest in prison reform, prisoner redemption, and psychology. Grace elicited sympathy from reform-minded Canadians and Americans, who were moved by her youth and the presumed fragility of her mental health. One of the myriad immigrants from Ireland who flooded Canadian shores, Grace had suffered extreme poverty, the loss of her mother, and the drunken violence of her father from an early age. Her defenders saw her as a bewildered child who became the unwilling victim of McDermott, who controlled her through threats. Her foes, influenced by traditional and contemporary attitudes toward women, saw her as a jealous temptress who was in love with Kinnear and persuaded McDermott to murder Nancy in order to get her out of the way, perhaps not foreseeing that McDermott's resentment of Kinnear would provoke a second crime. The three conflicting versions of events given by Grace and the two given by McDermott added to the confusion.

For years after the Kinnear...