What To Kill A Mocking Bird's writer's new book will tell us about Harper Lee's life, work and style

The date is circled on the calendar, July 14, when copies of Harper Lee’s new novel, her first in half a century after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, will flood the bookstores. New, of course, only in a manner of speaking, because Go Set a Watchman was written before Mockingbird, easily the most popularly beloved among all twentieth century novels.

Go Set a Watchman is only technically a sequel, set twenty years after the events of Mockingbird and so in the mid-fifties, as Scout visits her father Atticus Finch. The transcript dates back to the 1950s, and upon advice from her editor it was rewritten from the perspective of the young Scout to yield To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960 to instant acclaim as a classic. Two years later would appear the film of the same name, made with Lee’s active involvement and featuring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Another two years more, and Lee would retreat from public life, ceasing to grant interviews, releasing statements to distance herself from the odd biography or biopic that’d appear over the decades, and publishing no more books.

By all accounts, and there are only varying degrees of credibility attached to them, she led a hearty and lived life thereon, shuttling between Monroeville, her small Alabama town fictionalised as Maycomb in the novel, and Manhattan. But she would not feed the widespread curiosity about her or engage with the thriving tourist trail inspired by Mockingbird. Her book would continue to sell more than half a million, by some estimates nearer a million, copies each year, but Lee would not give more. In an obviously reluctant introduction to the book’s 35th anniversary edition, she’d write: “Mockingbird still says what it has to say; it has managed to survive without preamble”.

So, what will the new book say? Indications are that what we will get on July 14 will only be lightly, if at all, edited from the original manuscript. Her publishers HarperCollins said: “The original manuscript of the novel was considered to have been lost until fall 2014, when Tonja Carter (Lee’s attorney) discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird.”

It will, perhaps, give us a chance to better know Scout, and by extension Lee. It will allow us to understand better the literary perfection of Mockingbird, set in the American south during the Depression. Young Scout and her neighbour Dill were modelled on Lee herself and her friend and partner in literary ambition, Truman Capote. Atticus Finch, defending a black man in a rape trial charged by the racial politics of the time, was based on her father. So, as the newly published book will tell us what became of Scout and Atticus Finch, it may make us somewhat more aware of the process by which Mockingbird became the book it is.

Lee has been so withering in her disapproval of all attempts to inquire into her life that even what may be fact acquires a whiff of speculation, which has been anyway plentiful. For instance, rumours abound of how much of an influence Capote had on Mockingbird, some holding that he wrote chunks of it. It’s wild speculation, and I mention it only to remind you about the mysterious aura that’s settled around Lee and Capote. It is, they say, Lee in fact who contributed more significantly than credited to Capote’s In Cold Blood, having been an “assistant researchist” on his Kansas investigations in the interval between submitting the final manuscript of Mockingbird and it being finally published.

Go Set a Watchman may make clearer the nature of the Lee-Capote collaboration, if only by giving us one more book by Lee to set alongside her friend’s more voluminous work. Publication of In Cold Blood, with its paltry appreciation of Lee’s effort, is believed to have forced a lasting estrangement. Watchman may provide too a glimpse of the adult Dill, and thereby of Capote before he became the literary star and performer he did.

Lee’s eventual retreat from public life, even the writing life, has drawn much pop-psychology. Could it be that Mockingbird was just too successful a book? Reports of Watchman’s publication carried quotes from her last interview in 1964, that reception of Mockingbird was “just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I’d expected ... like being hit over the head and knocked cold”.

Last year an American reporter Marja Mills published The Mockingbird Next Door, an account of living, well, next door to Harper Lee in Monroeville, drawing a statement of disapproval from the great woman. Mills writes about asking Lee whether she really regretted having “written the damn thing” (Mockingbird). “Sometimes,” Lee reportedly answered. “But then it passes.”

Lee also did not approve of the publication in 2006 of a previous, and thoroughly engaging, biography by Charles Shields called Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. In it, Shields referred to an account from the late 1950s of Lee, then living in Manhattan, reworking her novel: “Suddenly she gathered up everything she’d written, walked over to a window, and threw the entire draft outside into the snow.” She then called her editor, who ordered her out into the darkness to gather the leafs.

Who knows how much of all this is true. Who’s to say that Watchman won’t turn out to be as perfect as To Kill a Mockingbird eventually was. Who’s to say that the new book will in fact allow us to wonder what may have been, of Lee’s writing life and her impact on literature, had she actually published Watchman in the 1950s. Let’s see.

Here's a peek at the cover of the new book: