The True Story of Grace Marks and Why Margaret Atwood Wrote About Her

The True Story of Grace Marks and Why Margaret Atwood Wrote About Her

This article relates to Alias Grace

The novel Alias Grace, handsomely written by Margaret Atwood, is based on the true life story of housemaid Grace Marks, convicted of taking part in the murder of Thomas Kinnear, who employed Marks, and his housekeeper/lover Nancy Montgomery. The murders took place north of Richmond Hill, Upper Canada (now Ontario), on the farm Kinnear owned. Kinnear was shot in the left side of his chest and Montgomery was struck in the head with an axe and then strangled before being dismembered and stuffed under a tub.

Grace Marks fled for the United States under an alias and was captured in Lewiston, New York, along with James McDermott, who was also a servant on the Kinnear property. Both were immigrants who were new hires to the Kinnear farm and when they fled they carried with them stolen property.

Grace Marks and James McDermott never stood trial for Nancy Montgomery's murder. It was superfluous after the dual convictions for the death of Thomas Kinnear, the trial for which took place in November 1843 in a packed courthouse.

Marks was stoic at the trial and was often described as beautiful and perhaps stupid to fall for a rogue like McDermott. According to the newspapers at the time, she came to court wearing clothes that she had stolen from Nancy Montgomery. Some thought she was crazy. Others, that she had been manipulated and victimized by McDermott, who was summarized as having "a swarthy complexion, and a sullen, downcast and forbidding countenance."

Both were convicted and sentenced to death; upon hearing the sentence, Grace Marks fainted. Right before McDermott was hanged, he blamed the crimes on Marks. He called her an "evil genius" and claimed she strangled Nancy Montgomery with a white cloth.

Marks's death sentence was commuted to life in prison because the jury asked for mercy. She served her time at the Kingston Penitentiary. Her stay at the penitentiary was interrupted for fifteen months when she was sent to the Provincial Lunatic Asylum, a horrible place with documented abuses. After twenty-nine years, Grace Marks was pardoned and disappeared from public life.

In the 1960s, Margaret Atwood read Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush, which chronicled nineteenth-century pioneer life. Part of the book was devoted to the Lunatic Asylum in Toronto, where the author, an English immigrant named Susanna Moodie, visited and interviewed Grace Marks. Moodie believed Marks was suffering from madness, a common opinion.

Atwood's fascination with Grace Marks was expressed in several different iterations. She published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a book of poetry based on Moodie's writings, in 1970. She wrote a screenplay about Marks called The Servant Girl, filmed by the CBC and released in 1974, and in 1979, produced a stage version simply titled Grace. By the time she wrote Alias Grace, the story had settled somewhat. Other accounts had been published, and Atwood had come to believe that Moodie had fictionalized parts of her document about Marks. Atwood writes, "Moodie said at the outset of her account that she was writing Grace Marks's story from memory, and as it turns out, her memory was no better than most."

In Alias Grace, as expected with a historical novel, Atwood's inventions amplify the melodramatic, and she has defended her approach. There were so many gaps in the true story, witnesses with conflicting accounts, and unknowns. It was fertile ground.

What Atwood accomplished in Alias Grace, without definitively proving guilt or innocence, was to shift the narrative around nineteenth-century women killers, who had often been considered unfeminine, unlovable, and possessed by demons. Atwood writes Grace as tall and pretty, using her looks to manipulate.

After her release from prison, Grace Marks was asked, "What has been the general cause of your misfortunes?"

Her answer: "Having been employed in the same house with a villain."

A sketch of Grace Marks and James McDermott as they appeared at their trial for murder in Toronto, Ontario, 1843
Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons

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This article relates to Alias Grace. It first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.