English: Alias Grace

Biographical information from Margaret Atwood's website.

Margaret Atwood was born on November 18, 1939, in Ottawa, Ontario, to parents of Nova Scotian origin. When she was seven, her family moved to Toronto but continued to spend the warmer months in the remote northern areas of Ontario and Quebec, where her father, an entomologist and zoology professor, studied tree-eating insects.

Margaret Eleanor "Peggy" Atwood, multitalented Canadian essayist, scriptwriter, children's author, fiction writer, and social critic, reached world-class status with the bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, a complex and disturbing futuristic thriller that placed the author among the twentieth century's leading feminist writers.

Atwood, Margaret (1939-...), is a Canadian poet, novelist, and critic. She has twice won the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most important literary award. Atwood won the prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin (2000), a complex family chronicle that includes a science-fiction novel within the main story. She won the prize again in 2019 for The Testaments (2019), a sequel to her hugely popular novel The Handmaid's Tale (1985).

Alias Grace is based on the mysterious real-life murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. Both James McDermott and Grace Marks were also real people and their fates are faithfully depicted in the novel.

It’s easy to say Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace speaks to the cultural moment. But that “moment” — the predatory sexual behavior of men and the undue burden it places on women — has been going on for hundreds of years.

At the center of the case was a beautiful young woman named Grace Marks. But was she really responsible for the crime?

Mad, bad, or dangerous to know? How can we understand the criminal mind and the commission of crimes?

This New York Times article discusses the modern landscape in which the Netflix adaptation of Alias Grace finds itself.

Unusually for costume dramas on television, Alias Grace presents an unvarnished picture of systematic male abuse of female servants that echoes the collective voice of the #metoo movement.

Alias Grace, which was originally published in 1996, is based on the true story of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant and servant in Upper Canada who finds herself accused of murdering her employer in 1843.

Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's fictionalized story of the real-life 1843 Kinnear-Montgomery murders. Explore a character analysis of Grace Marks, plot summary, and important quotes.

In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called “The Handmaid’s Tale.”