NPC Book Group to discuss novel about slavery, women’s rights
The National Press Club's Books & Brunch group will discuss “The Invention of Wings” by Sue Monk Kidd at noon on Saturday, Jan 23, in the Fourth Estate Restaurant.
The novel is a fictionalized history of Sarah Grimke (1792-1873) and her sister Angelina (1805-1879), who were pioneering advocates in both the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.
Angelina was the youngest of the 14 Grimke children (six died as infants) who grew up as members of Charleston’s slave-owning elite. Their father was one of South Carolina’s leading judges and a strong public supporter of slavery, who had private doubts about the practice.
In the novel Sarah’s mother gives her a slave girl named by her mother “Handful” to be her “companion and servant” as an 11th birthday gift.
In her January 2014 Washington Post review of the book, Margaret Wrinke writes that this gift “links the two girls destinies and we follow them from that moment in 1803 until 1838 as their country hurtles toward a unavoidable confrontation.”
The author’s technique of using brief, alternating chapters of first-person narrative by Sarah and then Handful effectively tells the story while illustrating the very different worlds the girls, then women, inhabit although both are in the same physical space.
The sisters’ father, John, who had fought in the American Revolution, was a highly regarded judge, and had served in the state legislature and as mayor of Charleston. Even though in the novel he tells Sarah that she would make a distinguished lawyer, he later ridicules the idea of any woman, including his brilliant daughter, going to a northern university as her adored older brother Thomas was doing, much less becoming a lawyer.
Later in the novel Sarah’s mother tells her: “The truth is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.”
After they flee Charleston to live in Pennsylvania, the Grimke sisters’ speeches opposing slavery to “mixed” male and female audiences caused widespread controversy. Clergy, who, while they supported freeing slaves, strongly opposed women making public speeches to “mixed” male and female audiences.
The book’s title refers to African folklore about a time when people were able to fly like birds and is a metaphor for escaping slavery.
The Feb. 20 Books & Brunch discussion will be on a book about the invention of real -- not metaphoric -- wings that enable people to fly: “The Wright Brothers" by David McCullough.
Books & Brunch discussions alternate between fiction and non-fiction with the group selecting books to discuss two months in advance. The discussions are open to all NPC members and their guests. In fact, members are encouraged to bring guests.
More information: Jack Williams, [email protected]