Sue Monk Kidd recognized by Historical Society for fiction, history

Imagine being given another human being as your 11th birthday present, as happens to Sarah, the heroine of Sue Monk Kidd's 2014 best-seller, The Invention of Wings.

Kidd's fact-based story is about the lives of famed early 19th-century Quaker abolitionist Sarah Grimké and the person she was gifted, her maidservant Handful, an 11-year-old born into slavery.

The novel vividly brings to life an era when such an event seemed normal; when slavery was considered natural, even righteous.

And, by implication, it was an era when Sarah's growing unease and disgust with the practice would have seemed odd, unhealthy, and perverse to her friends and her family, who were pillars of the community in Charleston, S.C. Worse yet, Sarah ends up befriending the slave and treating her as an intellectual equal.

Acclaimed by critics for its imaginative yet faithful recreation of historical fact, The Invention of Wings is set over a 35-year period and chronicles Sarah's activism after she moves to Philadelphia with her sister, Angelina, and Angelina's husband, Theodore Weld. The two women, who embraced the Quaker faith, were the first female leaders in the abolitionist movement.

The Invention of Wings, due out in paperback on Tuesday, also has drawn praise from historians. That includes the folks at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, who on Thursday will present Kidd with the organization's Founder's Award at a fund-raising banquet at the Union League in Center City. Former Gov. Ed Rendell is expected to make a brief appearance. (Tickets are sold out.)

Bestowed for "exemplary service to history," the annual award is given to individuals who further HSP's goal, "to champion history's uses and enhance its value to the public."

Past honorees include historian and former University of Pennsylvania president Sheldon Hackney; filmmaker Ken Burns; and broadcast journalists Jim Lehrer, Ed Bradley, Terry Gross, and Andrea Mitchell.

While some past recipients also have penned novels, Kidd is the first recipient to win the award based entirely on works of fiction, HSP president Page Talbott said.

"The story is thoroughly engaging," Talbott said. "I did know of the sisters and I had done a good deal of research [on them] . . . and knew some of the stories and people [Kidd] was describing, and it really rang true to me."

Talbott said Kidd's work fulfills the mission of HSP because it evokes in readers a powerful reaction to a historical truth.

A century and a half separates us from Sarah Grimké, but Kidd's novel brings us face to face with her reality, Talbott said.

Fiction "is such an important way for people to learn about history and become impassioned about their past," she said.

Kidd's 2002 novel  The Secret Life of Bees was a best-seller and even was adapted into a film. But it's The Invention of Wings that has put her firmly on the A list. That's due in large part to Oprah Winfrey, who picked the book for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Kidd laughed when asked in a phone interview how she's dealing with all the attention.

"It's been a very eventful year," she said with a touch of irony.

Kidd, 66, who grew up in Charleston, said she's ashamed to admit she didn't know much about the Grimké sisters. "I spent six months in deep research," she said.

Kidd drank up as many books on the era as she could, especially firsthand accounts of slavery, including American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, a groundbreaking book compiled by Weld and the Grimké sisters.

While Sarah and Angelina briefly did have a slave maidservant, the character of Handful is almost entirely fictional.

"It was extremely important for me to be able to write the story of an enslaved character that would stand upon its own next to Sarah's story," Kidd said.

"Sometimes it's a mystery how you write a character. What was surprising to me was how much easier it was to write Handful," Kidd said. "Sarah was confined to a historical script, but with Handful, I had the whole realm of my imagination."

Kidd said she was driven to write the book by an enigmatic question: How does someone like Sarah happen? How can someone who was raised by slaveholders in a region of slaveholders find the practice so abhorrent?

"What interests me are those processes inside human beings that make us go toward such a different direction," Kidd said.

Was it due to Handful? While Sarah Grimké's friendship with Handful was tipped heavily in one direction - Grimké had all the power in the relationship - could the intimacy they did share have awoken Sarah's conscience?

Kidd won't speculate, except to say she was awed by the courage it took Grimké to remain true to her convictions.

"She had that one thing, bravery," Kidd said, "and it didn't come naturally. She had to scrape up the courage to" stay true to her own inner prompting: "She just had this absolutely clear religious and moral vision that slavery was evil."