Just about halfway through and just a quick note on voice suiting historical placement, and the underlying image we get of a space that is of a different era than where the author resides.
Atwood’s narrative voice switches between that of the third person narrator and the first person of Grace, and does so admirably well. It could be Dickens or Austen or Poe that I’m reading as far as style, and in fact, in getting back into this style I find I am writing in a more formal manner myself.
And I said, Oh Agnes, what shall I do? I did not know she was going to die, and now they will blame me, for not telling sooner that she was taken ill; but she made me promise not to. And I was sobbing, and wringing my hands. (p. 176)
The above is Grace’s telling of her story to Simon Jordan in one of their sessions, which is how Atwood has chosen to give us background; the linear narrative that began the story–which follows a linear narrative that begins a few years after the murder and is the point at which Dr. Jordan meets Grace–is being clarified and fleshed out by this filling in of the past. It is also telling of the times and the societal strata:
I didn’t say anything about the doctor, and they did not ask. Perhaps they didn’t even consider such a thing. They must have thought it was only a lost baby, as women frequently have; and that Mary had died of it, as women frequently did. (p. 178)
Grace is relating the death of her friend, Mary Whitley, at the hands of a backroom abortion doctor. So it is the tale of a poor trusting servant girl who finds herself pregnant by a gentlemen of the upper class (I believe it to be her employer’s son) and is abandoned by him, and who must face a life on the streets and almost certain death for her baby as well as herself or risk the doctor’s knife without benefit of medications or sterile procedures.
But the language, the style of speech all tie in appropriately with the beliefs and practices of the time. Atwood, I am sure, had done some research as well as reading to get into voice for Alias Grace and has executed it beautifully.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology