The Gravedigger's Daughter

infobox Book|
name=The Gravedigger's Daughter
title_orig=
translator=


image_caption=
author=Joyce Carol Oates
illustrator=
cover_artist=
country=United States
language=English
series=
genre=Novel
publisher=Ecco Press
release_date=1 June 2007
english_release_date=
media_type=Print (Hardback)
pages=592 pp (first edition, hardback)
isbn=ISBN 0061236829 (first edition, hardback)
preceded_by=Black Girl / White Girl|

"The Gravedigger's Daughter" is a 2007 novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is her 36th published novel. According to Oates it is based on the life of her grandmother.

Plot summary

Rebecca Tignor is mistaken for another woman named Hazel Jones one afternoon in the woods nearby Chatauqua Falls, New York in the fall of 1959. Over 20 years later, Rebecca finds out that the man who approached her is a brutal serial killer.

In a secondary plot, Rebecca's parents escape from the Nazis in 1936, foreseeing the oncoming Holocaust; Rebecca is born in the boat crossing over. When Rebecca is 13, her father, Jacob Schwart, who has lost his intellectual dreams and has become a gravedigger and cemetery caretaker in Milburn, abruptly kills her mother, Anna, and nearly kills Rebecca, before committing suicide. At the time of the footpath crossing, Rebecca is just weeks away from being beaten and almost killed by her own husband, the brutal Niles Tignor. She and her only son, Niles Jr., flee, and she becomes the woman for whom she has been recently mistaken, purposefully adopting the identity of Hazel Jones. Niles Jr. assumes the alias of Zacharias. As Hazel, Rebecca seeks many livelihoods, as alternately a waitress, clerk and finally, the mistress of the overwhelmingly wealthy heir of the Gallagher media fortune, a man in whom she never felt the need to confide her past.