Jordan was struck by her from the very first moment he met her. See, there were key elements that she didn’t remember about that day that would help him to determine if she was truly a murderess or merely an unwilling accomplice. This story really picked up several years later when Doctor Simon Jordan decided to make a study of her and hoped to unlock some of her missing memories. She spent the next thirty years of her life incarcerated, first in an asylum and then in a prison. McDermott was sentenced to hang, while Marks was saved from the gallows by the spirited defence of her lawyer. The murders were rather sensationalized in Canadian society, what with the cold blooded brutality and the fact that a young, rather beautiful, young woman was involved. Grace Marks, at the age of 16 in 1843, was arrested along with James McDermott for the murders of their employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his mistress/housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Sketches made of Grace Marks and James McDermott during their sensationalized trial. It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor.” Sometimes at night I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess.

It has a smell to it, that word-musky and oppressive, like dead flowers in a vase. ”All the same, Murderess is a strong word to have attached to you. Atwood is also a current Vice-President of PEN International. She and Graeme Gibson are the Joint Honourary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society within BirdLife International. Margaret Atwood currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.Īssociations: Margaret Atwood was President of the Writers' Union of Canada from May 1981 to May 1982, and was President of International P.E.N., Canadian Centre (English Speaking) from 1984-1986. Atwood's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. Her non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth in the Massey series, appeared in 2008, and her most recent novel, The Year of the Flood, in the autumn of 2009. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Door, was published in 2007. The Tent (mini-fictions) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006. Atwood's dystopic novel, Oryx and Crake, was published in 2003. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid's Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Throughout her writing career, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honourary degrees. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood