Harper Lee May Actually
Be Pulling the Strings
One of the still lingering concerns about the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman is whether the aging author was manipulated into agreeing to it, particularly since the discovery of the manuscript and decision to publish it came after the death of Lee’s sister and caretaker, Alice Lee.
But there is a completely opposite theory, that Alice Lee’s death allowed her younger sister to finally do as she pleases.
Interviewing Charles Shields, author of author of the biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Neely Tucker of the Washington Post asks if Shields sees merits in the theory. He replies, “I agree entirely. Unfortunately, Ms. Carter [Lee’s lawyer] is becoming the fall person and I think she is taking direction from a woman who is quite up in her years and may want a little fillip in her years and have the little extra perk of being on the map again … I have to think that there’s a certain amount of joy in at last publishing the book Alice would never let her publish.”
The interview, which was shown on on C-Span2″s BookTV over the weekend is available online (the section referred to above begins at time stamp 42:00).
Interviewer Tucker has had his own experience trying to learn more about the Lee sisters. He wrote “To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel.”