If you've read Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, the historical fiction novel that describes a gruesome double murder in Canada in 1843, you would be interested to know the sources that were used by Atwood during her research. Life in the Clearings by Susanna Moodie was one such reference book in which the author, Susanna Moodie recounts her meeting with the infamous murderess Grace Marks, a young house help who was convicted to life imprisonment for her role in the slaying of her employers. Susanna Moodie was an Englishwoman born in Suffolk. Her two sisters were also writers. She wrote and published her first book of children's stories before she was twenty. Later, Moodie transcribed the narrative of a former Caribbean slave, Mary Price, as part of her involvement in the Anti-Slavery Society. She married a former military man who had served in the Napoleonic Wars and migrated to Canada in 1832. She continued to write about her life in the newly formed colonies there and today, these books are invaluable pieces of history that document a pioneering way of life. The customs, climate, wildlife and landscape as well as the social happenings of Upper Canada are brilliantly recorded in a series of journals, letters and biographical sketches that Moodie wrote to keep herself occupied and also to supplement the family income.