![]() ![]() ![]() In piecing together the story of Grace's life and death through the letters, Mattie comes to understand and solve many of the problems standing in the way of her own happiness and independence. ![]() Out of that need was born the character of Mattie Gokey, the sixteen-year-old hotel employee who witnesses Grace's body being pulled from the lake the evening after Grace asks her to burn her love letters. She felt a genuine grief which was alleviated through writing Grace's story and giving it fresh meaning. Upon reading the transcripts of Chester Gillette's trial and hearing Grace's voice through the letters used as evidence, the presence of the young woman haunted Donnelly. What captured Donnelly's imagination, however, was Grace herself and how she could have been any nineteen-year-old girl. Dreiser's novel, An American Tragedy, renders the couple's plight as a dark outcome of the American dream gone awry. Her firsthand account, reinforced by Donnelly's reading of Theodore Dreiser's novel concerning the same murder, stirred Donnelly's curiosity. Donnelly's great-grandmother had been working at a hotel on the lake when the murder took place. Jennifer Donnelly grew up on the outskirts of the Adirondacks hearing tales and ballads of the 1906 murder of Grace Brown, a pregnant nineteen-year-old drowned by her lover in Big Moose Lake. ![]()
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