Alias Grace
Authors: Margaret Atwood
INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
Alias Grace
“[Atwood’s] best novel yet, a great book of such wit, wisdom and dazzling storytelling that it leaves me in no doubt that Atwood is the most outstanding novelist currently writing in English.”
–
Sydney Morning Herald
“Atwood’s humor has never been slyer, her command of complex material more adept, her eroticism franker.… A stupendous performance.…”
–
Booklist
“[Atwood] has surpassed herself, writing with a glittering, singing intensity.…”
–
New York Review of Books
“Stunning …”
–
Calgary Herald
“A rare and splendid novel that pulls you in and won’t let go.…”
–
Washington Post Book World
“Seductive, beautifully articulated … Brilliantly conceived and executed …”
–
San Francisco Chronicle
“Astonishing …”
–
Financial Post
“A major achievement …”
–
Irish Times
“An absorbing and brilliantly told story.”
–
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“Atwood’s imaginative control of her period flows, irresistible and superb.… [She] has pushed the art to its extremes and the result is devastating. This, surely, is as far as a novel can go.”
–
Independent on Sunday
BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD
FICTION
The Edible Woman
(1969)
Surfacing
(1972)
Lady Oracle
(1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm
(1981)
Murder in the Dark
(1983)
Bluebeard’s Egg
(1983)
The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985)
Cat’s Eye
(1988)
Wilderness Tips
(1991)
Good Bones
(1992)
The Robber Bride
(1993)
Alias Grace
(1996)
The Blind Assassin
(2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders
(2001)
Oryx and Crake
(2003)
The Penelopiad
(2005)
The Tent
(2006)
Moral Disorder
(2006)
The Year of the Flood
(2009)
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree
(1978)
Anna’s Pet
(with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds
(1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut
(1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes
(2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda
(2004)
NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
(1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840
(1977)
Second Words
(1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature
(1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
(2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004
(2004)
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
(2008)
POETRY
Double Persephone
(1961)
The Circle Game
(1966)
The Animals in That Country
(1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970)
Procedures for Underground
(1970)
Power Politics
(1971)
You Are Happy
(1974)
Selected Poems
(1976)
Two-Headed Poems
(1978)
True Stories
(1981)
Interlunar
(1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986
(1986)
Morning in the Burned House
(1995)
The Door
(2007)
Copyright © 1996 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1996
Emblem edition published in 1999
This Emblem edition published in 2010
Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Emblem and colophon are registered trademarks of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Atwood, Margaret, 1939–
Alias Grace / Margaret Atwood.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-486-4
1. Marks, Grace, b. 1827 – Fiction. I. Title.
PS
8501.
T
86
A
77 2010
C
813.′54
C
2010-902596-2
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The drawing on
this page
is reproduced from
The Trials of James McDermott and Grace Marks …for the murder of Thomas Kinnear.…
Toronto, 1843 (Courtesy, Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library).
The excerpt on
this page
is from “The Poems of Our Climate” by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
. Copyright © 1942 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1970 by Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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Toronto, Ontario
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v3.1
For Graeme and Jess
Whatever may have happened through these years, God knows I speak truth, saying that you lie.
– William Morris,
“The Defence of Guenevere.”
I have no Tribunal.
– Emily Dickinson,
Letters
.
I cannot tell you what the light is, but I can tell you what it is not.… What is the motive of the light? What is the light?
– Eugene Marais,
The Soul of the White Ant
.
I.
JAGGED EDGE
At the time of my visit, there were only forty women in the Penitentiary. This speaks much for the superior moral training of the feebler sex. My chief object in visiting their department was to look at the celebrated murderess, Grace Marks, of whom I had heard a great deal, not only from the public papers, but from the gentleman who defended her upon her trial, and whose able pleading saved her from the gallows, on which her wretched accomplice closed his guilty career.
– Susanna Moodie,
Life in the Clearings
, 1853.
Come, see
real flowers
of this painful world.
– Bashō.
O
ut of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails’ eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground.
In the one instant before they come apart they are like the peonies in the front garden at Mr. Kinnear’s, that first day, only those were white. Nancy was cutting them. She wore a pale dress with pink rosebuds and a triple-flounced skirt, and a straw bonnet that hid her face. She carried a flat basket, to put the flowers in; she bent from the hips like a lady, holding her waist straight. When she heard us and turned to look, she put her hand up to her throat as if startled.
I tuck my head down while I walk, keeping step with the rest, eyes lowered, silently two by two around the yard, inside the square made by the high stone walls. My hands are clasped in front of me; they’re chapped, the knuckles reddened. I can’t remember a time when they were not like that. The toes of my shoes go in and out under the hem of my skirt, blue and white, blue and white, crunching on the pathway. These shoes fit me better than any I’ve ever had before.
It’s 1851. I’ll be twenty-four years old next birthday. I’ve been shut up in here since the age of sixteen. I am a model prisoner, and give no trouble. That’s what the Governor’s wife says, I have overheard her saying it. I’m skilled at overhearing. If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.