Maiden Flight: A Novel
This novel tells the story of an unsung heroine of the American century, Katharine Wright, sister of Orville and Wilbur. It is at once heartwarming and heartbreaking.
The heartwarming part is the way a guy named Harry Haskell, grandfather of the novelist as it happens and old friend of Katharine’s from college days, manages to court her and win her without her overly proprietary brother, Orville, and to some extent even Katharine herself, finding out.
Strong feelings tend to sneak up on these dutiful Midwesterners like heartland hailstorms on a sunny day, cheerfully endured as long as they do no lasting damage. In this case (here comes the heartbreak) they did. Orville, already bereft of his brother Wilbur, never forgave his little sister, his “Swesterchens” or “Swes,” for leaving him for Haskell. One’s heart breaks a second time when Katharine dies too soon (pneumonia) for Orville to forgive her, and too soon for her and Harry to take her fondly hoped-for trip to Europe.
These are mature lovers, Katharine and Harry, unaccustomed if not averse to sentimentality, but ingenuous and vulnerable all the same. Part of their bluff, straightforward charm lies in the way they can scarcely believe the depravity of the Wright brothers’ aeronautically pioneering competitors, those others like Glenn Curtiss trying for their piece of the pie of fame, trying to take away from Wilbur and Orville’s significance.
The longest dramatic thread, aside from Orville’s failure to forgive Katharine, is the Smithsonian’s obdurate championing of its secretary, a certain Samuel P. Langley, as the real inventor of the airplane.
What makes the Wrights’ innocence all the more palpable is that the Wrights, the Haskells and their friends are all cut from the same broad cloth linguistically, with “believe you me!” and usages like “cotton” as a transitive verb. Expect the words, the world and the world-view of Booth Tarkington, but think of it as 57 rather than 17, and instead of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Almost Magnificent Stefansson. Who’s that, you might ask? The most cinematic character in the story, a gallivanting and briefly dangerous Norwegian ne’er-do-well explorer who presents a hint of a love triangle for a while.
Don’t assume this is merely some kind of historical romance novel, though. The author explores some impressively complicated and profound matters, going well beyond “who gets the girl?” Happy as we eventually are for Katharine and Harry, Haskell does not present marriage as the answer to everything in life. “The heart knows its own bitterness,” Katharine says, and “we do, all of us, have to live alone, mostly.”
Authentic, informative, deeply felt but respectful of its principals’ no-nonsense approach to matters of the heart, this novel repays attention. Its greatest strength, like that of Wrights’ plane, may be its trustworthy inner structure, derived from long familiarity with primary sources like the family letters to which the author alone had access. Haskell’s novel is a valuable supplement and maybe even corrective to David McCullough’s prize-winning The Wright Brothers. From Maiden Flight you will have a far richer, a far kinder and probably a far fairer sense of who Katharine Wright really was.