Margaret Atwood further solidified her international reputation by winning the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin (2000), and Alias Grace was also short-listed for the Booker Prize in the year of its publication, 1996. During that same year, it won the Giller Prize, a prestigious Canadian award for fiction. Early in her career and over her constant objections, Atwood was classified as a feminist because of certain recurring motifs and because her career took flight during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the heyday of feminism. She has shown that she is far more than this single perspective would indicate, that her approaches to politics and literature are global and multifaceted and that she is enthusiastically involved in bringing about positive change.

While it is true that Atwood's foremost social concern is the treatment of women and that her female characters tend to be either powerful heroines...