Greatest Hits: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

This week we’re featuring some of our “greatest hits” – the most popular Book-a-Day blog posts since we started this almost three years ago. Today’s is Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, reviewed by Sarah K.

Living in the South, most of us are well acquainted with Southern Gothic authors (O’Conner, Faulkner, Williams), and the conventions of the genre (the grotesque, mental illness, and family secrets).  Likewise there is a subset of Canadian fiction called Southern Ontario Gothic, which deals with similar themes, usually within the context of dour propriety, social conventions, and stern Protestantism.  Think frigid cold versus steamy humidity.  One of the hallmarks of this genre is Alias Grace.

During 1843 in Upper Canada, Irish servant girl Grace Marks was convicted of murder for her role in the deaths of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, who was Kinnear’s lover at the time.  The circumstances of the murders were never fully understood, with Marks claiming at different times that she could not remember the events of the day, and that she was possessed by the spirit of a deceased friend*.  Both newspaper and personal accounts from the time were undecided if Marks was an unwitting accomplice or a diabolical mastermind.  Marks received a sentence of life in prison instead of hanging because of her age and gender.

In Alias Grace, Atwood takes the facts of the case and creates a fictionalized account of Marks’ life and the mystery surrounding her guilt or innocence.  The narrative alternates between Grace’s telling of her life and interviews with her alienist, Dr. Jordan, who is trying to discover Grace’s true character through a series of interviews.  Like the quilts that are a reoccurring image in the novel, Atwood pieces together a story that explores both the mores of the time and the fragmented nature of history, story, and truth.

*The Toronto Public Library has a digitized version of an account of the trial, which you can read here.

Find and reserve this book in our catalog.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

I fell in love with Alice Munro hard and fast one afternoon in English class.  The high school I attended was adequate but lax, the prime example being that our history teacher would yell out the window, “Be prudent, people!,” when pot smoke would waft into the classroom from the smoker’s pit below.  Most of us did not love literature for literature’s sake, and English class tended to drag.  One day our teacher handed us a photocopy of the story, “How I Met My Husband,” from Munro’s collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.  I began reading it, and I had a flash of recognition, as I caught a mention of the town where my school was.  It shocked me that someone knew that this town in the middle of nowhere existed, and had actually taken the time to mention it in a published piece of writing.

I later found out that Munro lived a mere hour away from my home town, and had grown up in the area, which is why her stories had so many places and patterns of speech that are familiar to me.  I began reading everything she had published.

For those who have not had the opportunity to read Munro before, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage stands out as one of her best collections.  Munro’s stories move back and forth in time examining the internal, unspoken lives of her characters caught with the bargains and concessions that they have made, such as the philandering husband whose wife finds new love in her Alzheimer’s ward, (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”), or the young woman who leaves her ailing mother to pursue a college degree (“Family Furniture”).  Munro’s style is precise, but lushly descriptive.  Her attention to details such as a description of teeth that “were crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument” give a liveliness to the prose that balance the melancholy nature of her subject matter.

It’s difficult to recommend a much-loved author without becoming too overblown.  However, outside of my idiosyncratic reasons for reading Munro, there is still her fine insightful writing that will probably give you a jolt of recognition too.

Find and reserve Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage in our catalog.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Living in the South, most of us are well acquainted with Southern Gothic authors (O’Conner, Faulkner, Williams), and the conventions of the genre (the grotesque, mental illness, and family secrets).  Likewise there is a subset of Canadian fiction called Southern Ontario Gothic, which deals with similar themes, usually within the context of dour propriety, social conventions, and stern Protestantism.  Think frigid cold versus steamy humidity.  One of the hallmarks of this genre is Alias Grace.

During 1843 in Upper Canada, Irish servant girl Grace Marks was convicted of murder for her role in the deaths of her employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, who was Kinnear’s lover at the time.  The circumstances of the murders were never fully understood, with Marks claiming at different times that she could not remember the events of the day, and that she was possessed by the spirit of a deceased friend*.  Both newspaper and personal accounts from the time were undecided if Marks was an unwitting accomplice or a diabolical mastermind.  Marks received a sentence of life in prison instead of hanging because of her age and gender.

In Alias Grace, Atwood takes the facts of the case and creates a fictionalized account of Marks’ life and the mystery surrounding her guilt or innocence.  The narrative alternates between Grace’s telling of her life and interviews with her alienist, Dr. Jordan, who is trying to discover Grace’s true character through a series of interviews.  Like the quilts that are a reoccurring image in the novel, Atwood pieces together a story that explores both the mores of the time and the fragmented nature of history, story, and truth.

*The Toronto Public Library has a digitized version of an account of the trial, which you can read here.

Find and reserve Alias Grace in our catalog.