Fact or fiction?
As a rule, I dislike excessively revealing introductions (like the one in my edition of
The House on the Strand), but for fictionalised versions of real events I prefer to know up-front what is real and what is made up. So in the case of this book I would have preferred to have had the "Author's Afterword" given as an introduction.
Lacking an informative introduction, I did some cursory research as I read. This gave such disconcerting things as the
Wikipedia article on Grace Marks that says: "What is known of Marks on the historical record comes primarily from Susanna Moodie's book
Life in the Clearings Versus the Bush."
Now I'd already taken a quick look at Moodie's very moody chapter on Grace Marks, (see
Project Gutenberg), in which Moodie tells us: "About eight or nine years ago--I write from memory, and am not very certain as to dates--a young Irish emigrant girl was hired into the service of Captain Kinnaird, an officer on half-pay, who had purchased a farm about thirty miles in the rear of Toronto; but the name of the township, and the county in which it was situated, I have forgotten; but this is of little consequence to my narrative."
Taken together, the Wikipedia and Moodie sources offer a very inauspicious start. From these we might assume that all of Atwood's story was fiction. However, we eventually reach Atwood's afterword and get some reassurance that there is more to rely on than Susanna Moodie (thank goodness!).
I'm not a fan of this sort of fictionalisation, but having finally reached the end of it I can say that I think Atwood seems to have, technically at least, done a reasonable job in blending of fact and fiction (accepting what she tells me in the afterword). This much is good.