The First Book Club was a Success!

There was a wealth of information to discuss about Alias Grace and certainly no definite answers. Margaret Atwood would enjoy that, don't you think? We were split down the middle on Grace's quilt or innocence. And we all agreed that we would remember Grace for a long time.

Our next meeting will be hosted by Rachel on Sunday, November 4. The book is called Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris. Rachel will let us know where, soon. We decided that we would just volunteer to be next host at each group.

I've attached an interview with Margaret Atwood and also a historical document written about the murders.

See you next time.

p.s. Anna was there but left just before the photo was taken! Sorry Anna! And Sharon was sick but we did have a mini-conference call with her to get her opinion!

Historical Duggan Letter Donated to Richmond Hill Public Library An

1843 letter written by G. Duggan Jr., purchased at a recent auction by Margaret Atwood, was donated to the Richmond Hill

Public Library during a public reading on February 21st.

Margaret Atwood read from her recent bestselling novel Alias Grace, which is set in Richmond Hill and revolves around the sensational real-life 1843 murder of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery. The letter, dated less than two weeks after the murder, was written by a close friend of the victim and was addressed to Kinnear’s relatives in his native Scotland. In the letter, Duggan details in florid prose the dramatic facts of the double-murder as they were reported in the local newspapers of the day. “The ruffian [James McDermott] instantly discharged a gun at him and shot him dead upon the spot. He seems to have spoken only in a dying groan of oh, oh, and had pressed the book to his bleeding bosom,” Duggan wrote.

Atwood is donating the letter to the Richmond Hill Public Library, which holds other material related to the murder in its archive, in recognition of their help in researching the book. Librarians and archivists are important in assisting us in preserving and later uncovering our past. I’m grateful to the Richmond Hill Public Library for their assistance in the research for Alias Grace, and I’m delighted to be able to give them this addition to their Kinnear archive material.”

An intrepid reader and collector of postal history in Nova Scotia discovered the letter when it went up for auction in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and notified Ms. Atwood’s office. The letter was part of a collection of trans-Atlantic postal history owned by Jack C. Arnell of Bermuda.
- Copyright © O.W. Toad Ltd.

GA letter to J. Skelton Esq., Peterhead, Scotlandfrom G. Duggan Jr, Toronto, Canada
In hasteToronto (City) August 11, 1843

Dear Sir,
From a long and happy acquaintance with Mr. Thomas Kinnear and being his professional friend within the Colony, I feel obliged to enter upon to me a most painful task and one would that no cause existed for but my duty to you and his other relatives rendered it unavoidable to me & I trust that He on whom all may lean for support in the hour of deep distress & afflictions may sustain his aged and affectionate mother and his other relatives under the [trying tidings?] of which this is the harbinger. I need hardly tell you poor Thomas Kinnear is now no more. He died on the 29th July at the hand of ruffian murderers. An ungrateful and wretched villain of a servant man named James McDermott. He perpetrated the foul deed on the evening of the day above and the details are too horrible too painful to the feelings of humanity enter upon and too dreadful for his surviving relatives to listen to, alas it must be disclosed sooner or later. The brief outline is that he (T.K.) had been at the place for two days on [business?] and it was expected on his return he [would?] bring home money with him. He had three servants the man McDermott, woman calling herself Grace Marks both of whom were only three weeks in his employment and an old faithful housekeeper named Nancy Montgomery all of whom he left at his farm. On his return home he [missed?] his housekeeper Nancy and inquire where she was gone to. The other two pretended she was gone to a neighbour at a distance to visit a person very ill. He seems then to have thought little about it and spoke about getting his tea and was in the [meantime?] reclining on a sofa with a book it seems McDermott called him from the Hall and poor fellow he came to the Hall with the book in hand. The ruffian instantly discharged a gun at him and shot him dead upon the spot. He seems to have spoken only in a dying groan of oh, oh and had pressed the book to his bleeding bosom and expired. The wretch shortly after took the book and placed in a small [compartment?] in the cellar and he & the servant Grace Marks [ ] [ ] the night stole as many clothes and light articles as they could conveniently take in a one horse carriage & took Kinnear’s horse & carriage & the above property and absconded to the United States on Sunday following [being?] the next day the house was found vacant and suspicion was awakened & search made & the body found in the cellar. No tidings were to be had of any of the servants but doubts were entertained as to the fate of Nancy. [ ] search was made but in vain. On Monday further search was made & by accident a tub in the cellar was overturned and beneath it as it were [] it was found the body of the murdered Nancy Montgomery. She had been strangled and bandage was tightly and strongly tied on her neck and in that manner the unfortunate woman was murdered but the guilty parties were promptly followed & apprehended and are now in jail here and will shortly be tried for their diabolical deeds the woman Grace Marks declares she knew nothing of the murder of the housekeeper but she saw and heard the murder of Mr. Kinnear and that McDermott shot him in the hope of getting some money. I send a newspaper herewith in which some of the particulars are therein. I have given directions that an inventory be taken of all the property and affects and examined myself minutely for a will amongst his papers. The only document of the kind found in a draft of a deed a copy of which is herewith enclosed it will be desirable that some person should administer to his Estate or that some of his relatives should come out and look after in the mean time I shall keep watch on it and endeavour to keep every article forthcoming. The Coroner is at present in charge and he is acting under my advice. I shall be happy to be useful in any way in my power to relatives of one to whom I was so much attached and whom I so much respected as my worthy but departed friend Thomas Kinnear. I intended to have been brief and await you reply but have perhaps indulged in expression natural if not necessary. Deeply sympathising with his afflicted relatives and endeared friends, I remain

Yours,
G. Duggan Jr.

P.S. I saw among the papers of your deceased relative a letter which he received from his mother & as recent a date as July 1st.

From Margaret Atwood

Dear Reader,
The central figure in my novel is Grace Marks, one of the most "celebrated" women of her generation, having been convicted of murder in 1843 at the age of sixteen. How did Grace enter my imagination?

As a child in the 1940s I learned in our school reader about Susanna Moodie, an English emigrant who over a century ago settled in the Canadian backwoods. She was unsuited to pioneer life and wrote about her experiences, including the fire that took her log cabin, in Roughing It In The Bush. I myself had grown up in cabins in the north, so the image of the fire was an anxiety-producing one for me. After I became a writer, I had a vivid dream about Susanna Moodie. I dreamt I'd written an opera about her--unlikely, as I could barely read music. I was impressed enough by my own inner life to get Moodie's books out of the library, and in her second book, Life In The Clearings, I found Moodie's version of Grace Marks, as she describes her meeting with Grace in the Kingston Penitentiary and dramatizes the double murder for which Grace was convicted. She also recounts a later meeting with Grace in the Lunatic Asylum; there her account ends.

Years passed and Grace Marks continued to wander around in my head. I wrote a script about her for a television play. More time passed and she kept insisting on being given a fuller hearing, so I began to write this novel. Was Grace Marks the cunning female demon many considered her to be--or was she simply a terrorized victim? I began researching, not only the murder case but life in Victorian times. Every major element in the book was suggested by something in the writing about Grace and her times, however suspect such writing might be; in gaps left unfilled, I was free to invent. Since there were a lot of gaps, there is a lot of invention.

My readers always ask how much personal experience I put into my books. I can truthfully say I've never murdered anyone or run away with the hired man, as she did. But there is one bit of autobiography: the laundry. When I lived in the north of Canada the laundry was done in washtubs, with the water heated on a wood stove, and when I was Grace's age, much of it was done by me. Grace's pleasure when she has a line of clean white washing flapping in the breeze comes straight from the heart. As for the pieced quilts, they too are autobiographical: my grandmother in Nova Scotia had a large supply of them. I tried to sew one once but it was too much for me.

In fact, the novel itself at times seemed almost too much for me; I found myself wondering where the parsnips would have been stored, wrestling through the details of Victorian domestic and prison life. But I finally made it to the end. And so now it's your turn. I invite you to meet ALIAS GRACE. May she stop wandering around in my head, and perhaps wander around in yours for a while.

Best wishes,
Margaret Atwood

Interview with Margaret Atwood

In her bestselling novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood masterfully took us to a chilling world of the future. In her astonishing new novel, Alias Grace, she just as convincingly takes us back 150 years and inside the life and mind of one of the most notorious women of the 1840s. Grace Marks is serving a life sentence for her part in the vicious murders of Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy land owner who employed her as a maid, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. James McDermott, who was hanged for the murders, accused Grace in his confession of leading him on and promising sexual favors in return for the murders, but Grace herself claims to have no memory of the killings. Weaving together sex, violence, the burgeoning science of psychiatry, and a good old- fashioned mystery, Atwood has created a novel--and recreated an era--of mesmerizing power.

Doubleday spoke with Margaret Atwood in Ireland, where she is finishing up some "odds and ends" and plunging into her new novel.

DOUBLEDAY: Many of the characters in Alias Grace, including Grace Marks, are historical figures. How did you first discover this story?

MARGARET ATWOOD: I came across it a long time ago when I was writing a series of poems about one of the people who makes an appearance in the book--Susanna Moodie, who wrote the story down. But she wrote it, as she says, from memory, and she got a lot of it wrong, as I found when I went back to the actual newspapers of the time and went into things such as the prison records. It always bothered me that the story Moodie told was so theatrical. It made you wonder, could it really have been like that? And when I went back to check, in fact, it wasn't. She had done a certain amount of embroidery.

D: How did you determine when to stick to the facts, and when to fictionalize?

MA: When there was a known fact, I felt that I had to use it. In other words, I stuck to the known facts when they were truly known. But when there were gaps or when there were things suggested that nobody ever explained, I felt I was free to invent. For instance, Mary Whitney was the name that appears as Grace's alias in the picture that accompanies her confession, but none of the commentators ever mentions a thing about it. Although people at the time may have set down a version of events, you can't actually go back and question them. And they leave out the things that you would most like to know. People don't have the consideration to foresee that you might be interested in this stuff 150 years later.

D: What was the most challenging bit of history for you to find?

MA: The most difficult thing I had to discover was at the very beginning--I tried to find Thomas Kinnear. It turned out there were two Thomas Kinnears, and one of them would have been about seventy- three years old at the time of the murders. I figured it couldn't have been him-- otherwise you wouldn't have had the steamy element of the story, with Thomas Kinnear having a mistress who was his housekeeper, and some people feeling that he was also flirting with Grace. So I went looking for him, and I couldn't find his grave or Nancy's grave, although I knew where they were supposed to be buried. I discovered that they really were buried there, but in unmarked graves. I did finally trace Kinnear back through the Scottish end, and it appears that he was the half brother of a man who lived in Scotland. But the Burke's Peerage listing for the family shows Thomas as dying in the year when he turns up in Canada. In other words, it's the age-old English point of view that going to Canada is the same as death. It's also true, however, that Scottish families often felt that it was as scandalous to be murdered as to do the murdering, and the Kinnears may have tried to cover up the murder.

D: How reliable was the news coverage then?

MA: Very unreliable. Sort of like now when a story first broke what you got is what you get now, which is rumor. In this case, there was a great deal of speculation about who had murdered Kinnear. At first they thought that one of the murdered people had done it, because they hadn't found Nancy yet. They thought she had run offwith the two other servants and that if they could find her, they would know the truth. But then they did find her, and she was dead.
So there was a lot of speculation about that; there was also a lot of editorializing, with political factions taking different points of view. That is, the very conservative ones were against Grace Marks, and the reformers were more for her; in their eyes, she was a victim. So you've got two quite distinct points of view, as well as a lot of digressions. People were talking about letting too many immigrants in--sound familiar?--and the need for better letters of reference for servants.

D: Has the growth of TV journalism improved or decreased the reliability of the news?

MA: You will always have biased points of view, and you'll always have the story behind the story that hasn't come out yet. And any form of journalism you're involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge. Also, there's the very human need to shape a story and make it mean something. One person telling the story may have one spin on it and another person may have quite a different one. You saw that a lot in the O. J. Simpson trial. And it's particularly evident when it's a matter of a crime. When a crime has been committed, opinions get extreme.

D: How differently do you think Grace would have been treated today--psychiatrically and judicially?

MA: It would be a very different kind of trial. Today you would have expert witnesses. There weren't any then, you didn't have any of that at all . And certainly psychiatry as we have it today was not recognized as a science in the same way then. There were medical practitioners who were interested in it and people who were studying mental conditions, but there was nothing like the kind of establishment we have today.

D: Grace often felt that people were curious about her less because she was a "celebrated murderess" than McDermott's "paramour. " What role did the Victorian attitude toward sex play in her treatment?

MA: About the same as it would now. She certainly was celebrated, by the way. People went to see her the way you would go to see the elephant in the zoo. In those days you could visit prisons and insane asylums as a tourist attraction. People would go to the prison and say,"Here I am, and I'd like to see Grace Marks. " And she would be trotted out for them to look at.
The question is, would they have been as interested if there hadn't been a sex angle? Well, probably not, same as now. The big question for them was: Did she or didn't she? And there were things to be said on either side. For instance, although she had run off with McDermott, when they got to the tavern in Lewiston, they had separate rooms. It was generally assumed that it was that kind of relationship, but Grace is not on record anywhere as having said so.

D: In your afterword, you write that the attitudes people had toward Grace "reflected contemporary ambiguity about the nature of woman. " What do you mean by that?

MA: One group felt that women were feeble and incapable of definite action; that is, Grace must have been compelled by force to run away with McDermott and that she was a victim. Other people took the view that women, when they got going, were inherently more evil than men, and that it was therefore Grace who had instigated the crime and led McDermott on. So you had a real split between woman as demon and woman as pathetic.