Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [0]
The Robber Bride
“Nobody maps female psychic territory the way Margaret Atwood does.… What a treasure she is.…”
– Newsweek
“A hugely enjoyable novel.”
– Globe and Mail
“Imaginative and suspenseful … a virtuoso performance.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Thoroughly engaging … it has heft … depth and staying power.”
– The Gazette (Montreal)
“Wickedly funny … witty … well-observed.”
– The Observer (U.K.)
“Atwood is at the top of her form.”
– Boston Sunday Globe
“Grabs the funny bone, the brain, and sometimes the throat.”
– The Whig-Standard (Kingston)
“Brilliant and entertaining.”
– Ottawa Sun
“Startling, provocative and rewarding.”
– Canadian Forum
“Excitements, wit and insight sizzle across the pages. Atwood’s survey of impulses that bedevil life seethes with imagination, inventiveness and intelligence.”
– Peter Kemp
“Compelling and astonishingly rich.…”
– Books in Canada
BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD
FICTION
The Edible Woman (1969)
Surfacing (1972)
Lady Oracle (1976)
Dancing Girls (1977)
Life Before Man (1979)
Bodily Harm (1981)
Murder in the Dark (1983)
Bluebeard’s Egg (1983)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Cat’s Eye (1988)
Wilderness Tips (1991)
Good Bones (1992)
The Robber Bride (1993)
Alias Grace (1996)
The Blind Assassin (2000)
Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001)
Oryx and Crake (2003)
The Penelopiad (2005)
The Tent (2006)
Moral Disorder (2006)
FOR CHILDREN
Up in the Tree (1978)
Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980)
For the Birds (1990)
Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995)
Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)
Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004)
NON-FICTION
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)
Days of the Rebels 1815–1840 (1977)
Second Words (1982)
Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996)
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (2004)
POETRY
Double Persephone (1961)
The Circle Game (1966)
The Animals in That Country (1968)
The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
Procedures for Underground (1970)
Power Politics (1971)
You Are Happy (1974)
Selected Poems (1976)
Two-Headed Poems (1978)
True Stories (1981)
Interlunar (1984)
Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986 (1986)
Morning in the Burned House (1995)
Copyright © 1993 by O.W. Toad Ltd.
First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1993
Trade paperback edition first published 1998
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Atwood, Margaret, 1939–
The robber bride
eISBN: 978-1-55199-497-0
I. Title.
PS8501.T86R63 C813′.54 C93-094444-5
PR9199.3.A78R63
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem
v3.1
For Graeme and Jess;
and for Ruth, Phoebe, Rosie, and Anna.
For Absent Friends.
A rattlesnake that doesn’t bite teaches you nothing.
– Jessamyn West
Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.
– Günter Grass
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
– Oscar Wilde
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication