Beginning 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 m ....

Middle of Essay
.... 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 simultaneously to reveal the character of Grace in her own words and to paint a broad picture of mid-19th century Canada as a nation experiencing the passionate explosions of sci ....