Harper Lee sequel: Can't we leave "To Kill a Mockingbird" in peace?

The news that Harper Lee is to publish a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird has provoked mass excitement from the novel’s fans. The Pulitzer-winning Mockingbird packs a punch, especially with teenagers. Who hasn’t dreamed of being Atticus Finch, the heroic lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of rape? Or identified with Scout, a girl maturing in a world less innocent than she once thought?

Lee’s sequel, Go Set a Watchman, which will be published in July, follows the story of a grown-up Scout returning to see an elderly Atticus in Maycomb 20 years on from the trial. According to The New York Times, it “tackles the racial tensions brewing in the South in the 1950s and delves into the complex relationship between father and daughter.” It arrives 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the longest silences in American literature.

But all is not as it seems. The new novel was actually written before To Kill a Mockingbird, and was abandoned when an editor suggested that Lee concentrate on the flashback sequences about her heroine’s childhood. From this Mockingbird was born. Lee thought the Watchman manuscript was lost but in any case made no effort to rewrite the story, nor did she show much inclination to publish—until now.

As the writer Philip Hensher has pointed out, the timing is slightly suspect. Last Autumn, Lee’s friend and lawyer Tonja Carter found the manuscript of Watchman in her archives attached to a typed version of Mockingbird. Lee was initially unwilling to publish, but now says that, “After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.” Lee’s elder sister Alice Lee, fiercely protective of Harper’s legacy and  referred to as her Attitcus, died three months ago. According to reports, the 88-year-old Lee is deaf, blind and in poor health. Questions have been raised over whether she has been pressured into putting out an abandoned first draft of Mockingbird. (Jonathan Burnham, the vice president of HarperCollins which will be printing two million copies of the book this summer, has said that he is “completely confident” that Lee approved the deal.)

In recent years there has been a tendency for authors’ first drafts, off-cuts or private writings to be repackaged as a glamorous long-lost work. Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, an unfinished novel that the author wanted destroyed on his death, was published in 2009 by the author’s son Dmitri. Nabokov, famously a perfectionist with his prose, would hardly have been happy to see a substandard work so lavishly produced. Poor old Philip Larkin, so careful about what he put into print, has seen his smutty stories about schoolgirls, Trouble at Willow Gables, published by Faber. JD Salinger, as famous a recluse as Harper Lee, will see his wartime stories and reworked fiction featuring Holden Caulfield published over the next five years.

When an author becomes an industry and their name a brand, it is tempting for publishers to try to satisfy the public’s demand for new work. But there’s something undignified about scraping an author’s archives for every last thing they set to paper. This attitude also relies on the misguided notion that an author's truest or most revealing work lies hidden at the bottom of the drawer. Apart from unusual cases such as EM Forster’s gay novel Maurice, which he didn’t want published in his lifetime, the bottom drawer more often contains the failed attempts and early drafts of the books the authors then laboured to improve. We await to see what Go Set a Watchman will be like, but I can’t help feeling that Atticus and Scout should have been left in peace.