Mount Pleasant, S.C. ? Sue Monk Kidd had modest expectations for her first novel. She hoped it would be liked, might find an audience and, perhaps, make some small contribution to the literary world.

She never anticipated anything like the success of “The Secret Life of Bees.”

The first novel became something of a phenomenon in the publishing industry, selling 3.25 million copies to date and appearing on The New York Times’ list of best sellers for more than a year and a half.

“I don’t even think I had dreams of something that big,” Kidd says, sitting in the living room of her home overlooking a reach of wind-swept tidal marsh in this Charleston suburb. “I was just writing my second novel naively disconnected from the idea that there was any pressure involved or any expectation.”

That second novel, “The Mermaid Chair,” went on sale April 5 amid much anticipation, generally positive reviews and an initial print run of 400,000 copies. And, like its predecessor, it climbed the best-seller charts.

Indeed, two weeks after its release, “The Mermaid Chair” was ensconced in the No. 2 position on the Publisher’s Weekly hardcover list while “The Secret Life of Bees” remained at No. 3 on the trade paperback list.

“The Secret Life of Bees,” published in 2002, was met initially with positive reviews. Then came a half dozen literary awards and nominations and a seemingly permanent place on best-seller lists. Now, a movie is in the works. And as the sales piled up, a friend suggested it would be difficult for Kidd to write anything nearly as good.

“Then it all crashed in at once — that there is some pressure here and a tremendous amount of expectation. And, of course, that is very bad for the writing,” recalls Kidd, who has an easy smile, dark eyes, close-cropped auburn hair and expressive hands.

For several weeks, she stopped writing altogether amid the anxiety.

“The way I got over that hump was to be very emphatic. I just said, ‘Look, you’re a writer and you write what you write so get over this.’ I think that’s what a grown-up writer does. They don’t dwell on the last work and compare it.”

“The Secret Life of Bees,” set in 1964, tells the story of a young white girl who runs away with her caretaker and ends up living in a small South Carolina town with a trio of black sisters who keep bees.

Kidd has won literary awards for more than a decade, including a 1994 citation in “Best American Short Stories” for the story that was the basis of her first novel. Her spiritual memoirs — “God’s Joyful Surprise” (1988), “When the Heart Waits” 1990 and “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter” (1996) — brought her note as a serious writer.

She dreamed of being a writer as a child growing up in a small town in southwest Georgia during the 1960s. She would listen to the stories and tales her father told. At 15, she was influenced further by reading Thoreau’s “Walden” and Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening.”

After graduating from college, she worked for a time as a nurse and nursing instructor before turning her attention full time to writing.

“The Mermaid Chair” is the story a woman who returns from Atlanta to her girlhood home on fictional Egret Island off the South Carolina coast. There she learns the truth about the death of her father when she was a child and falls in love with a monk from the island’s Benedictine abbey. In the abbey is the mermaid chair, reputed to have mystical powers. The image is based on a real chair with a mermaid motif in a church in the village of Zennor, in Cornwall, England.

“There is something about a mermaid image in a church that conjures up a lot of story and possibility,” Kidd says. “You have these tensions — the spiritual and sensual side of each person and how they both tug us in different directions and how they intersect.”

In literature, there have been a number of tales of monks falling in love with women, she said.

“I thought it was interesting to flip the tables and think about that from a woman’s perspective,” Kidd says. “What if there was a woman and she fell in love with a monk? What kind of crisis would that have thrown her into, and how would she have worked that out in her soul?”