The invention of wings

The Invention of Wings is a novel by the American writer Sue Monk Kidd, published in 2014. It is set in Charleston, South Carolina, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it gives its two central characters alternating voices.

Handful Grimke is an enslaved child in a wealthy urban household, and she has grown up watching the house's walls and rules and wanting out of them. Sarah Grimke is the household's daughter, clever enough to know from an early age that she is meant for something larger than the marriage being arranged for her, and hemmed in by what a woman of her class is permitted to do. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given a girl of her own age as a waiting maid, an arrangement she does not want and cannot refuse, and the two of them spend the book working out what they owe each other across a line neither chose to be born on.

The novel is based on the lives of the Grimke sisters, who became abolitionists and campaigners for women's rights, and it puts the historical record alongside the story of the girl who was given to one of them as a present.