The Wright Sister
Happy Publication Day to this lovely epistolary novel from the fictionalized perspective of Katharine Wright Haskell. Author Patty Dann gives the less famous, The Wright Sister (2020), a voice through her letters to Orville and her Marriage Diary, following her late-in-life marriage to widower Harry Haskell.* Dann’s novel includes everything from the Wright children’s home life as children and adults who never left home, Katharine’s role in the invention of the flying machine, and her middle-aged first marriage to a man she has known nearly all her adult life. The first-person perspective provided by Katharine’s one-sided correspondence with her brother Orville and her diary entries, is at once intimate, humorous, and rambling, as it reflects the thoughts, memories, and daily life of a 1920s woman in her fifties.
Although omnipresent in the Wright Brothers’ global tours and grand meetings with world leaders, Katharine Wright Haskell is nearly lost to history. Before reading this slender novel I knew little of her life (I am not sure I knew the Wright Brothers had a sister), but thanks to Patty Dann I now do. Based largely on historical record and fact, this novel breathes life into 1920s America and touches on historical themes such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, flappers, religious and sexual freedom, and, of course, the age of invention. Dann’s novel also describes the unintended consequences of one’s invention as it touches upon the Wright siblings’ response to WWI’s destruction (of which their flying machine was an important component). This novel witnesses a middle-aged woman looking back on her life and contemplating her achievements as well as her remaining aspirations, sorting through the traumas and happy memories of her family life, and reveling in the unexpected love she has found. Katharine Wright Haskell was no ordinary woman and her memories and achievements include things that shifted our culture substantially, from her significant role in Dayton’s Suffrage movement to the invention of the airplane.
Much of this novel focuses on the tragic estrangement between the Katharine and her brother Orville following Katharine’s marriage in 1926 at the age of 52. It nods at Orville’s OCD tendencies throughout his life, and the ways that Katharine supported him. Through the intimate voice a sister writing her closest living brother, as well as the thoughts in her Marriage Diary, The Wright Sister describes and unpacks the most private of life’s details, but in succinct, often poetic or humorous, terms. The novel progresses through Katharine’s letters to Orv and her marriage diary entries from fall of 1926 to spring of 1929 when she faces her first truly solo flight.
For any fan of historical fiction, America’s age of invention, or 1920s American culture, the short letters and diary entries that comprise this novel will be a fast, moving read. I love it when a good historical fiction leaves you researching historical event, and you discover that while some of the novel is certainly conjecture, much of it is rooted in fact. This was certainly the case with Patty Dann’s The Wright Sister.
*Many thanks to the folks at Harper Perennial for sending me an Advanced Reading Copy to review.
A Few Great Quotes:
“I would like to go on record that along with being in bed with Harry, I am currently only comfortable at night sitting in the cool empty tub” (45).
“I am reading a book by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. '[. . .] I think he is a wise if peculiar man, as all wise men are, and that no matter how smooth or raggedy the arcs of our lives are, we are all trying to leave our mark, just like those girls’ toboggans left tracks in the snow” (67).
“He is a modern man. I do not know whether he has girlfriends or prefers men. Last night he asked me if I agreed with Freud that what one sees in childhood leaves stains for the rest of your life. I was surprised at that word, but that’s what he said. Stains. Perhaps we should all speak up about such stains” (86).
“He does not understand why Orv does not speak to us, but he, unlike me, simply accepts it. ‘Humans are complicated beings,’ he has said on more than one occasion” (104).
Bibliography:
Dann, Patty. The Wright Sister: A Novel. Harper Perennial: New York, 2020.
