This true crime provides the basis for Margaret Atwood's novel, Alias Grace. The real Grace Marks spent almost 30 years locked away from the public, in both the penitentiary and an insane asylum. Throughout those years, many people worked to obtain Grace a pardon, often seeking medical opinions regarding her mental state at the time of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper. They eventually succeeded, and she was released from prison in 1872. The fictional account of her life uses conversations between Grace and a psychiatrist to paint a vivid picture of her life leading up to the murders.
I found the book fascinating in many ways. Atwood uses excerpts from various publications of the time period to illustrate the sensationalistic aspects of the crime, then counteracts them with Grace's calm, dispassionate description of her (brief) life's events. This balance effectively represents the polarity in public opinion about the real Grace. Suspense builds dramatically in the novel, as Grace's discussions with the doctor draw nearer and nearer to the events which caused her imprisonment. As each session ended, and other details dominated the novel, I kept wanting to jump ahead to the next session to find out what really happened. Then there was the hypnotism scene... Yes, finally, I would know!
Unfortunately, that's where reality intruded. Instead of finding out what really happened, I got another possible explanation for Grace's amnesia of the events. I have to give Atwood credit; it would have been so easy to make up an ending where Grace was innocent and truly deserved to be pardoned, or where Grace was guilty as sin and should have been hanged. Atwood sticks to the facts of the case, though, and leaves the reader hanging instead. Only those people directly involved in those long-ago events could know what really happened, and Grace Marks kept that knowledge locked away someplace where even she (and certainly not Margaret Atwood) couldn't reach it.