Part 1 of Essay
IN 1970 , known only in small, mostly Canadian circles for her poetry, published a book entitled The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a persona poem sequence written from the point of view of a legendary 19th-century Canadian pioneer who had encountered the notorious murderess Grace Marks on a visit to a lunatic asylum. Grace h ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... as that of an omniscient narrator, this blend of fact and fiction is pieced together like a quilt (a deliberate metaphor established from the novel's divisions or chapters, each named for a particular pattern of quilting). The events leading up to the murders are revealed through narrative, letters, newspaper accounts, excerpts from Susanna Moodie's journal, notes by doctors and wardens and poems by Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Atwood maintains an ironic distance that manages sim ....