How did you come across this story, and how was it that you came to put the book together the way you did?

How I came across the story, I came across it first in a book by a person of the time called Susanna Moodie, who spent seven horrible years in the woods, because her family had emigrated. She wrote a book called Roughing it in the Bush, which was directed to other English gentlepeople telling them not to do it. Don’t do this. And then she got out of that, and they lived in a town calle d Bellville, which is on Lake Ontario. She had an impractical husband, so she thought she had to write in order to — for her family to make extra money. And she did what Charles Dickens had done in 1842. She went to Niagara Falls. Charles Dickens complain ed about the rude inscriptions in the guest book. And Susanna didn’t know quite what to think. She visited the Kingston Penitentiary, as you could in those days, sort of like a zoo tour. And there she asked to see Grace Marks, because Grace Marks was noto rious in her day. And she saw Grace Marks, and then she wrote up what she remembered of the case. She wrote it from memory. Her memory wasn’t very good. And then (later) she went on and visited the Toronto Lunatic Asylum, and there was Grace in that place , because she had meanwhile been transferred. Susanna Moodie’s eyewitness accounts said she was absolutely screaming out of her mind — says Susanna Moodie. But people faked those things. Especially convicts did, because it was nicer in the Asylum. And Sus anna Moodie ends her account of the whole thing by saying possibly Grace was deranged at the time of the crime and that accounts for it all, and therefore she will be forgiven in the afterlife. Then she publishes her book. Little does she know that right after that Grace gets sent back to the Penitentiary. The new man coming in thought she was sane enough to go back, and back she went.

So that’s where I first read about it, and Susanna Moodie has a little Victorian play. Grace is the villain. James Mc Dermott is the dupe. She got him into it, led him on, instigated the whole thing, because she was jealous of Nancy Montgomery, the housekeeper and mistress, and in love with Thomas Kinnear, the gentleman master. So all she wants killed is Nancy, and she d oesn’t really think he’s going to do it, and when he does, she goes — shock, horror — and he says 'Now we have to kill Thomas Kinnear.' She says ‘No, no. That wasn’t part of the plan,’ and he says ‘Ah ha, now I see it all, and now I realize what your real motive was when you promised me you in return for killing Nancy, and now you’ve got to deliver, and now I’m going to kill (Kinnear),’ and he does. And then everything else follows along from that. And Moodie tells the whole thing from the point of view o f McDermott. She tells it through his persona and ends with him sort of screaming and raving about how it was really Grace. There’s a little bit of grounds for her story, because right before he was hanged he did say that Grace was the instigator of the w hole thing and that she had helped him strangle Nancy. But he was known to be a liar. Who are you going to credit? So that’s the Moodie story, and that’s the only story I knew for quite a long time. And I did write a little television play based on it, al though I never did believe her statement that they had cut Nancy up into four quarters before putting her into the washtub. Somebody suggested that I try turning it into a play, and I did try, but I’m not really a playwright, and it didn’t really work out . I was still just using Moodie’s version. Time went by, lots of time went by, and I started working on the current novel, and at that point I went back to the historical record, such as it was, and found out that Susanna Moodie in fact had not remembered very accurately. So that’s how I came across the story. Now how I wrote it is the usual way you write a book — trial and error, throwing stuff out, trying one approach, feeling it doesn’t work, discarding it, trying another approach, finding other pieces of information relative to what you’ve already written. Having to throw that out, having to rewrite it.

Are there significant storylines that you had to discard?

I had to discard about the first hundred pages after I’d written them — or that a pproach that was in the first hundred pages, because I had a third-person Grace, and that third-person Grace wasn’t working for me at all. So I went back to first-person Grace. And various other things. I originally intended to have the Simon Jordan chara cter meet with the Susanna Moodie person, but if he had done so, he would have had to have said ‘ I think you made some of this up,’ and that wouldn’t have been socially advisable at the time. You wouldn’t have done that. A gentleman wouldn’t have done tha t.

I really liked the quilt motif, how all these various parts came together to make a whole. And the scope of the novel is amazing.

It got bigger than I intended it to be. I think originally there were only nine quilt-pattern titles, and then I just needed more. I needed to have more to cover the actual story as it unfolded. So that happened, and a lot of it is that you find as you go along what it is that you need.

Though some of your books have parallels between them, each one has its own world. Do you completely change your mind-set with each novel?

I think I probably do, or it changes, or it has changed in between the books. But what you’re trying to do is be faithful to the material. You’re trying to be faithful to the book you ’re writing. And often some of your most wonderful — what you think of at first as your most wonderful pieces of prose have to go. Because they don’t fit. You know, it’s obviously you and not the person in the book talking, and you have to take that part out. A lot of writing, I think, is cutting things out. At least it is for me. You write something, and it’s just too much, it’s overkill and has to come down.

Why Grace?

What was so intriguing about her? Well there are two things that are intri guing. One, you have a household. They’re getting along fine. A gentleman in easy circumstances, probably a remittance man. Younger son, doubtless sent to the Colonies because of his soft and loose ways by the older who has inherited the property and who wishes to cut a respectable figure. If (Kinnear’s) having an affair with his housekeeper in Canada, he’s probably done similar things before. He’s in his early 40s, and there he is with some money, with the family silver, with the family crest, which coul d not be found in any of the family crests of Scottish families. I think they made it up. New money, probably, newish money. And living in an unorthodox manner. He was not visited by the respectable ladies of the neighborhood. Although, par for the course , he was by the respectable gentleman, which was how things went in those days. And they’re getting along fine. Probably unbeknownst to him Nancy is pregnant. He feels he needed more servant help. They have hired a manservant, James McDermott. And right a fter that, along comes Grace Marks. These two people are only in the household for three weeks when, bang, there’s a double murder. What on Earth went on among those four people? Some people say Grace was jealous of Nancy. Other people say, other people w ho were there and knew these people say Nancy was jealous of Grace. It could have been both, probably. Bad feelings anyway, mostly directed towards Kinnear. You think if it was Nancy they wanted to kill, why didn’t they just kill Nancy? Because Kinnear ha d the horse. He went off with the horse. He came back with the horse and wagon. One of my problems was where was the wagon. So they needed a vehicle to make their escape. If they had walked they would have been caught immediately. They hid the bodies. The y hid them in the cellar, but the cellar wasn’t the kind of cellar that you or I might have or that might be familiar. It was reached by trapdoor in the main entrance hall under the carpet. So if you didn’t know the house you wouldn’t know it was there.

Did you visit the house?

No. It’s gone. But it’s well described by people at the trial, saying they went into the house, it was empty, they thought it was strange because Mr. Kinnear had invited them to dinner, nobody was there, they went away, they thought it was strange, they came back, they went and got somebody else, they came back, they piddled around for a while, and then somebody who knew the house thought of looking in the cellar. They found Mr. Kinnear right away. He was out in plain vi ew. They didn’t find Nancy until about a day later. She was out of sight — Why? Because they were concealing her from Mr. Kinnear. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that anything untoward had happened, except the horse and wagon were gone and there was no one in the house. So that was one thing that was interesting about Grace. What on Earth went on amongst all of those people to cause this to happen? Number two — opinion on Grace was very divided, as it usually is when there’s a violent crime involving b oth a man and a woman. Usually opinion is undivided about the man — he dunnit — and divided about the woman. Was she the demon instigator? Was she playing Bonnie to his Clyde? Or was she a terrorized bystander only peripherally involved, fleeing out of te rror for her own life. He did shoot at her. They found a bullet where she said it would be. So she could have been out of her mind with fear, knowing that he’d killed two people, was threatening to kill her. She had to go with him. She was only ever conv icted as an accessory in the murder of Thomas. The murder of Nancy was never tried. So there are these two versions, with half the population thinking she was absolutely awful, a terrible Delilah. The other half thinking that she is a weak, simple-minded, very young, terrorized female victim. And she did get off. She was condemned to death, and her sentence was commuted. The judge recommended clemency. It was a jury trial, but the jury brought in the death penalty, and the judge recommended clemency. And petitions were brought out, signed by some of her former employers — she was well though of by them. So here you have this divided opinion. And then you get people writing about her, projecting onto her all of the received opinions of women, about crimina lity, about servants, about insanity, sexuality. All of these things just get projected onto her. So I was interested in that. I was interested in the process of public opinion and how it’s formed, how people read into situations their own concerns. How e ach person, even people who are witnesses, have their own version.

About public opinion. It’s troubling that both of the views of Grace are so misogynistic

It was the 19th Century.

So either way you can’t win.

Well, I think you’re probably better off with the second, because you’re less likely to be hanged. And her supporters were promoting the second. They were promoting the idea of her simple-mindedness. It would tell more in her favor. Now it was obvious from her later history tha t she was not at all simple-minded. But it was more in her favor to be shown that way. You can see why it would be. It’s just common sense. If she was portrayed as really smart, then the question would be, ‘If you’re so smart, why couldn’t you think of a way of getting away from this man once you were in Toronto and going and telling the authorities?’ In fact, the lawyer for the prosecutor said to her some complicated question such as, ‘If you had been smarter than you are, wouldn’t you have done that?’ So of course it was better for her to be shown as a child — ignorant, kind of stupid child.

Do you feel that you’re cleaning her up in your version?

No. No. No. No. No. No more than other people did at the time. As I said, it was very divided. A nd we have a man writing at the end of the century who was nine at the time who knew all of these people as a nine-year-old boy. Not Jamie Walsh. He used to filch apples out of Thomas Kinnear’s orchard. He said Grace was a very amiable and kindly person. And that is what Doctor Workman said, who was head of the Lunatic Asylum, the one who sent her back to the pen and said she was very helpful to the other inmates, she was really very nice, no complaints. So he was not portraying any kind of a female demon . Other people were. So it’s not me making up this nice view of her. The nice view was a view of the time by people who knew her. So was the bad view. These people also knew her. It’s the O.J. Simpson trial, you know?

Was it really the trial of the century?

It was certainly the trial of the decade in that part of the world. It made it into the international press — at a time when such things didn’t exist to the extent that they do now, but there were newspapers, and it made it into the New York papers and the London papers. The people were very interested in it, partly because it was so rare for a woman, especially such a young one, and especially so good-looking, and especially a servant, to be involved in a crime of that kind.

The Char acter Mary — where does she come from?

Mary comes from the portrait of Grace that’s in the book, which is a real one, supposedly sketched at the trial. And underneath it, it says “Grace Marks alias Mary Whitney.” Does anybody tell you another thing ab out it?

So you just made up Mary completely?

I didn’t make her up completely. My reasoning was that if Grace was going to use an alias, she wouldn’t have used Whitney unless she had known some Whitneys. This is the Whitney Hotel, but it’s not t hat common a name. There’s a Whitney Public School in Toronto, which I in fact attended. So there were Whitneys around. She probably knew some Whitneys. Mary’s story and sad end is based on a sad end in a biography of a doctor of the time. An account of t he life of a country doctor in mid-century his name was Doctor Langstaff. And he in fact practiced in Richmond Hill, but right after the murders — he didn’t know Grace — but there are several cases of girls like this dying in that fashion. And he was us ually called as a doctor giving evidence against another doctor. She was based on that, and she was certainly based on lives of servants at the time.

About Grace — there’s the question of guilty or not-guilty, but the totality of the novel leads aw ay from this kind of judgment.

The fullness of Grace is the point. And the other point is that there are some things that, although there is an answer to them, it’s not an answer that we will ever know. We will never know the true story of the John Ke nnedy assassination, because even if Mr. X emerges and says ‘Well, it was me all along,’ the waters have been so muddied that we’re not going to believe him. Or some of us will and others won’t. There are certain things that I know in fact in history, and there are other things that are hazy areas.

So are you not interested in her guilt or innocence?

I am interested in it. I just can’t supply an answer. I think it’s also quite possible for people to feel guilty for things they haven’t done. Things they’ve been peripherally involved in but have not in fact done. And there’s all kinds of ways of reading her behavior. She did have a window of opportunity during which she could have gone and told on James McDermott in Toronto. She could have run off to people and said, ‘Help, help, this man just killed two people, and they’re in the cellar.’ She could have done that. But she would have know in doing that that was the same as killing him. She would have known beyond a shadow of a doubt, in those tim es, he would have hanged. And she in fact didn’t testify against him until it was obvious that it was going to come down to her or him. Or that she could improve her own chances by indicating that he had done it and not her. He on the other hand tried to pin it on her with that ridiculous story about the porridge. She would not have needed any help putting poison in the porridge if that had been what she wanted to do.

But McDermott held back the truth for different reasons.

He saved his revelat ion about the cellar, because if he had told it he would have convicted himself. He couldn’t say, ‘She helped me kill Nancy,’ without saying, ‘I killed Nancy too.’ First he tried to drop that poison porridge story to indicate that she had been the main in stigator of it. But I didn’t particularly believe that one.

Alias Grace reminds me of those Foucault books about hermaphrodites and murderers. It seems like you’re challenging the reader to not decide what or who Grace was?

Well, you cou ld have a go. Lots of people did. But you won’t necessarily arrive at a point of certainty. You could say, ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt,’ as any jury has to say, ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ So it is one of those things. If you’re interested in this area, there’s a book called Victorian Murderesses, in which it’s obvious that some of them were convicted not for murdering anybody, but for having adulterous affairs. Not the evidence about the poison in the gruel, or whatever it may have been. It’s th e love-letters to somebody else that cause them to be condemned. And some of them got off. They had obviously killed people. They had definitely killed them, but they got off because of the circumstances surrounding. One of them shot her husband’s mistres s. She got off. Because of the bad behavior of the mistress. Mistresses behave badly.