[1] Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who researches the case.

While Jordan is ostensibly conducting research into criminal behaviour, he slowly becomes personally involved in the Marks story and seeks to reconcile his perception of the mild-mannered woman he sees with the murder of which she has been convicted.

Subsequently, Atwood wrote the 1974 CBC Television film The Servant Girl about Marks, also based on Susanna Moodie's account.

However, in Alias Grace, Atwood says that she has changed her opinion of Marks, having read more widely and discovered that Moodie had fabricated parts of her third-hand account of the murders.

[4] Grace Marks, the convicted murderess, has been hired out from prison to serve as a domestic servant in the home of the Governor of the penitentiary.

Grace cannot remember what happened on the day of the murders, and she exhibits symptoms of hysteria, so the minister hires Dr. Simon Jordan, a psychiatrist, to interview her, hoping he will find her to be a hysteric, and not a criminal.

Jordan tries to lead Grace into talking about her dreams and her memories, but she evades his suggestions, so he asks her to start at the beginning, and she proceeds to tell him the story of her life.

Government reforms made soon after the Rebellion reduced corruption and restricted the power of the ruling oligarchies, which also worried the upper classes.

The idea that the lower classes could rise above their station by hard work or cleverness (rather than by ancestry and inheritance) was finding acceptance in the United States, so the Canadian aristocracy, basing their identity on their English heritage, felt threatened.

[8] The novel is written in the Southern Ontario Gothic style, highlighting the social ills of the time, while exhibiting the corruption and moral hypocrisy of the upper class.

Others might view the use of the term "alias" in the title as suggesting that in their search for the truth about Grace Marks, both readers and characters may be frustrated by duplicity.

She belongs instead to the marginal communities of immigrants, servants, and mad people, who are always vulnerable, and often lost—as Grace lost her mother, and Mary Whitney (her only friend).

[16] The only simple truths for Grace are about things—quilts, sheets, carpets, petticoats, the laundry of her life; she gains confidence from a needle and thread.

"[4] It may be noted that the publication of this book corresponds in time with the height of psychiatric interest in "multiple personality disorder" as a legitimate category of illness.

This technique has been largely discredited by the accumulated evidence that trance causes in its subjects increased certainty of the truth of certain memories, whether or not they are in fact true, and that what we remember is often substantially distorted by our own desires.

From a psychiatric perspective, Atwood's version of Grace's story is entirely consistent with a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, including the perplexing fact that the clinician can rarely be certain of the actual events "remembered" by the patient.