12 Women On What Harper Lee’s Work Has Meant To Them

Watch out, world: Go Set a Watchman is coming.

The news broke yesterday that 88-year-old author Harper Lee will be publishing a second book. The novel, written before her classic To Kill A Mockingbird, was thought to be lost, and then allegedly rediscovered by Lee’s lawyer, Tonja Carter.

“It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort,” Lee said in a statement released by HarperCollins, who will publish the book this summer. “My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout. I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told.”

The news is undoubtedly exciting, but folks on the Internet have raised concerns about Lee’s consent in releasing the second novel. Neither HarperCollins nor Carter would tell The Guardian whether the publisher met with or spoke directly to Lee, and the publisher of HaperCollins told The New York Times that speaking with Lee “wasn’t necessary.” Lee is famously intensely private and once said: “As long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.”

11. “Her writing was a beautiful escape from a school where I was bullied and outcast for being a ‘nerd’.”
— Fiona Riches, Facebook comment

This new Harper Lee novel news is the literary equivalent of a surprise Bey album, if you need some context

— Rachel Syme (@rachsyme) February 3, 2015

The Huffington Post