Reading Order
Alias Grace Reading Order
Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) is a standalone historical novel based on the true story of Grace Marks, a Canadian servant girl convicted in 1843 of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper, and the young doctor Simon Jordan who is commissioned to assess her mental state and determine whether she was responsible for her actions. One of Atwood's most celebrated novels, combining the historical crime novel with feminist analysis of memory, confession, and the construction of female identity.
Where to start
Alias Grace
Complete Alias Grace Book List
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Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood·1996·The complete novel. Entirely standalone. - Buy
The Handmaid's Tale
OptionalMargaret Atwood·1985·The most celebrated of Atwood's speculative fiction novels — a near-future theocracy in which fertile women are enslaved as Handmaids to reproduce for the ruling class; shares Alias Grace's interest in women whose testimony is controlled and interpreted by men, and in female survival through the performance of compliant femininity. - Buy
In the Skin of a Lion
OptionalMichael Ondaatje·1987·The building of Toronto's public infrastructure in the 1920s and 1930s, told through the lives of immigrant workers and the women who move among them — the Canadian historical novel most directly comparable to Alias Grace in its engagement with Canadian working-class history and its lyrical prose style. - Buy
My Brilliant Friend
OptionalElena Ferrante·2011·Elena and Lila grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood in the 1950s — Ferrante's quartet shares Alias Grace's interest in female friendship as a relationship of mutual fascination and potential exploitation, and its first-person female narrator whose reliability and self-knowledge are constantly in question.
Alias Grace — Frequently Asked Questions
What actually happened in the Grace Marks case?
Grace Marks and James McDermott were convicted of murdering Thomas Kinnear, a gentleman farmer, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress, in Richmond Hill, Ontario in July 1843. McDermott was hanged; Grace Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment. The evidence against Marks was ambiguous — she had been present at the murders but her degree of participation was disputed, and her account of events changed over time. She spent twenty-eight years in prison and an asylum before being pardoned and released in 1873. The case attracted enormous public attention, partly because of Marks's youth (she was about sixteen at the time of the murders), partly because her story changed with each telling, and partly because the question of what drove the murders — economic desperation, sexual exploitation by the household, McDermott's coercion of Marks, or Marks's own agency — was never resolved. Atwood based her novel on the historical record while fictionalizing the psychiatric interviews that are its central device.
Is Grace Marks guilty in Alias Grace?
Atwood deliberately refuses to answer this question. The novel is structured so that the reader, like the fictional Dr. Jordan, cannot reach a confident conclusion about Grace's guilt. Grace narrates her own story at great length and in compelling detail, but she cannot — or will not — remember the moments during which the murders actually occurred. She describes a hypnotic episode during which another personality, 'Mary Whitney,' appears to have spoken through her, suggesting either genuine dissociation or a sophisticated performance of insanity. Jordan, who is professionally trained to assess mental states, finds himself no closer to the truth after months of interviews than he was at the beginning. Atwood's point is that the question of guilt, in this case, is not separate from the question of what kind of story we tell about poor women who find themselves in impossible situations — and that the desire for a clear answer is itself part of the problem.
How is Alias Grace different from The Handmaid's Tale?
The two novels share Atwood's fundamental preoccupation — the ways that female bodies, female testimony, and female experience are controlled and interpreted by patriarchal authority — but approach it through entirely different methods. The Handmaid's Tale is speculative fiction: a future dystopia, deliberately estranging, using science fiction conventions to defamiliarize the oppression of women and make it visible as a structure. Alias Grace is historical fiction: a reconstruction of a real case, grounded in documented fact, using the historical novel's conventions of fidelity to the record and psychological empathy for lost lives. Both novels are about women who are imprisoned (Offred in the Red Center and the Colonies; Grace in prison and asylum) and whose testimony is extracted by men for institutional purposes. But where The Handmaid's Tale reaches its conclusions through extrapolation and warning, Alias Grace reaches them through excavation and witness.
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