Aside from all this, however, I was curious about what Kidd was really thinking about in terms of the background of the story and deciding how she was going to go about writing it. This article provides some interesting reasoning directly from Sue Monk Kidd herself, including the fascinating fact that Sarah and Angelina Grimke were some of the most famous women in America in their own time period (although I have a feeling that a better word than famous would be infamous). As we’ve pointed out in class before, Kidd was not aiming to simply write an account of what history says happened while filling in some blanks with her imagination. Rather, she took the universe in which Sarah Grimke lived and reimagined it, almost completely inventing Handful and her whole background to tell the story that she wanted to tell. At the end of the day, Kidd used existing people and scenarios as a backdrop for the story she wanted to tell, and I think this was her goal: to add a richness to the actual history, and to convey her own ideas through it.
What other motives do you think Sue Monk Kidd had for her novel? What do you think of how historical fiction takes history and builds on it, in general?