Katharine, the Wright Sister: A Novel

“For the reader who wants a time machine of the body and the heart, this novel is a great flight of fiction into the lives of three Wrights who dreamed—and of their times.”

The famous pioneer aviators, the Wright brothers, had a sister. What role did she play in their great success?

Tracey Enerson Wood’s new novel, Katharine, The Wright Sister, explores what that experience might have been like, with their “successes and failures in equal measure.” In the story, she is the taskmaster, the “sassy, bossy, and busy” starches (“little sister”) who will not let brothers Wilbur/Will and Orville/Orv give up on what is the dream of flight carried by all three.

This novel uses several clever ideas while keeping the story engaging and personable. The famously quirky Wright brothers are sufficient material for a book. Wood’s fiction describes how they lived in Gilded Age Ohio, in a middle-class” peculiar family” when Midwest America was preparing to become the great center of the coming Golden Age of American technology.

The Wrights were also siblings, and Katharine was a woman in the last days before the great struggle against the widespread legal and societal restrictions on women. Katharine opens appropriately with the protagonist receiving a glider (today we would call it a drone) for her birthday while her brother Orville (who shared the same birthday) and brother Wilbur run off with Orville’s present of a new, homemade bicycle.

Even as children, in this tale, older brother “Wilbur was the boss, and Orville was his favorite accomplice;” Will is the older child who excels at everything. Wood has it that Katharine would be more than in the shadows but left behind by her brothers for her whole life, something most little sisters with brothers can appreciate.

Throughout the book, “Bishop” Milton Wright (the Wrights’ struggling father) is portrayed as an inspiring figure, neither abusive nor indulgent, but a practical family manager who respects his children’s ambitions and opinions. Mercifully, the author does not write that he “gave them wings.”

This book is filled with detail, not just about the Wrights, but about the age, with such things as toothache drops, ice skating at the soldiers’ home, bicycles, bringing heavy loads of real books from a library, Oberlin College, cooking in the period, and even imagined government conspiracies. Katharine helps the reader to see the real Wright boys as very different people, even though that is contrary to some popular history that “it seems that they should have been twins.”

That context is necessary to appreciate the Wright family's struggles and the siblings' refusal to give up on Wilbur’s dream of flight despite facing adversity. As fiction, Katharine provides humanity and credible insights into the Wrights and their world in ways that nonfiction often does not because of limitations on conclusions based, as a lawyer would say, on facts found in evidence.

The fiction and nonfiction story of Katharine Wright only begins with building a successful airplane. In real life, Katharine Wright was an incredible, honored international figure and was a full partner in her brothers’ great endeavors. She was a leader in the Suffragette Movement. Her importance in the Wrights’ great success was lost until a campaign to remember her at the time of the centennial of the first flight at Kitty Hawk.

Wood might have improved human interest by using Katharine’s ambitions and frustrations rather than just her actions. She is willing to sacrifice for reasons unexplained to achieve flight at least as much as her brothers.

More self-doubt, tension, and self-examination would have given Katharine's character more depth. She would become more identifiable with young people in every period. This novel sometimes seems more of a biography of all three of the Wright siblings.

The Wrights succeed in achieving flight only halfway through the book. What followed for the rest of their lives proves engrossing reading. Katharine’s life and the novel do not have a happy ending. Whatever this work may lack in page-turning drama, it succeeds with charm, helped by exceptional clarity, especially considering that the book is an amazing human drama built about pioneering aeronautics.

For the reader who wants a time machine of the body and the heart, this novel is a great flight of fiction into the lives of three Wrights who dreamed—and of their times. The novel concludes with notes and questions by the author.