The Invention of Wings Study Guide

Sue Monk Kidd grew up in Sylvester, Georgia. She graduated from Texas Christian University with a B.S. in Nursing and practiced as a nurse into her thirties. Kidd then began to take writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, then published in the Christian magazine Guideposts and wrote three books regarding her spiritual journey. Kidd’s first novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2002), focuses on life in the South during the Civil Rights Era and became a literary sensation, spending more than two years on the New York Times Bestseller list. The Invention of Wings returns to Charleston, Kidd’s hometown for many years, to examine racial relations in the Antebellum South. Kidd now lives in southwest Florida with her husband and serves on the Writer’s Council of Poets & Writers, Inc.

Toward the end of the antebellum years in the South, activists began touring the country advocating for abolition to free the slaves. This movement gave rise to women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, who wrote passionate pamphlets and rousing speeches in defense of the essential human rights of slaves. These efforts soon turned to the issue of gender equality as backlash to the visibility of women in the abolition movement rose. William Lloyd Garrison published a newspaper called The Liberator that published letters and treatises advocating freedom for the slaves. In the novel, Sarah becomes a Quaker minister in order to better speak out against slavery. The Quaker religion became synonymous with the abolitionist cause, as many Quakers formed part of the Underground Railroad – safe houses that helped escaped slaves reach freedom in the North. The slave revolt in Charleston that Handful joins in was also a real event, planned by the actual Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822, as slaves took inspiration from the successful Haitian rebellion of 1803 that liberated Haitian slaves from their masters through intense bloodshed. Revolts like this one gained support from slaves in protest against their treatment, though almost all were either ended before they began or failed in execution. These efforts, both peaceful and violent, continued until the Civil War in 1861 that ended slavery in America for good, though the fight for true equality between the races is in many senses still on-going today.

The Invention of Wings is a work of Historical Fiction that details daily life in a specific time and place as it explores sexism and racism in the American South, much like works such as The Help by Kathryn Stockett (also another white author writing, somewhat controversially, in the voice of a black character). It also encompasses years of growth and historical change similar to All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr or The Blue Door by Ann Rinaldi. With its focus on a powerful female friendship complicated by the disparate circumstances of the two women, The Invention of Wings also is similar to works like My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante or Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.