Tributes Harper Lee The Legacy She’s Left Us “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) Harper Lee – a legend, an inspiration, a childhood icon – has passed away. Having lived out her whole life post-To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) in anonymity, Lee had been a recluse for the last few decades and her readers only imagined her through her protagonist Scout’s voice. Last year, however, she found and released Go Set a Watchman (2015), the parent and sequel to the novel that the world knew her by. Had Harper Lee’s death be announced this time last year, it would have been met with silent acceptance and musings of it being her time, or with surprise that she had not already passed. Now, however, we have been given a taste of more. We had been jolted out of our resignation in July 2015 and have not stopped talking about Lee since. We cannot silently accept Lee’s passing; her two beautiful novels are not enough. My memories of spending hours in the cool dungeon that was the English room of my school and being taken on a riveting, moving journey through Harper Lee’s novel flood me now: my teacher inviting the small group of five that had elected for higher English into the teachers lounge so we would be appropriately comfortable to delve into and appreciate fully the beauty that is To Kill a Mockingbird; falling in love with literature all over again every single time we cracked the volume open; going on a wild ride through a child’s eyes to seeing her grow up and deal with testing points in life; tackling societal problems together like gender norms, race and class, until we felt like we could take on the world. The serene, soft focused novel with lilting wit and narrative sophistication changed my life, like many others. The novel that gave everyone bundles of cherished memories has been left as just that, a memory. It had been a waking dream that was gently slipping out of our minds as we went about our life. And then, Harper Lee’s lawyer discovered her original manuscript, that her editor had said needed work. Chronologically set after To Kill a Mockingbird but written much earlier as the first version of it, Go Set a Watchman is raw, complex and as far from tame as it can get. It makes you rethink everything you accepted in To Kill a Mockingbird and urges the reader to scratch under the surface, instead of recording life and its injustices through the eyes of a child. The angry, anxious book with a racist Atticus Finch has been everything that To Kill a Mockingbird was not. As The Telegraph puts it, had To Kill a Mockingbird been a little more complex, “it wouldn’t have been so much of a fairy tale; it wouldn’t have been taught in schools everywhere, and it probably wouldn’t even have been considered a classic. But it would have been a masterpiece.” This is what makes it so hard to accept the news that has been unceremoniously thrust upon us. We have been jolted awake from our reverie; we have had a taste of more, and now cannot settle for less. Making this dismal situation even worse is the surge of conspiracy theories that have come up after Lee’s two successive years under the spotlight. Conjecture that Truman Capote (her close friend and the inspiration for the character Dill) wrote the book, speculations on her state of mind (and thus ability to decide to publish Go Set a Watchman), questions on her talent (that she was an accidental writer with only one book in her) are thoughts that make ardent fans wince. At the same time, most of her readers are glad that she only ever published one book (albeit twice), because it would have almost been the same, revisiting similar settings and circumstances. As she poignantly predicted in 1961 (the year she won the Pulitzer prize), “I have a horrible feeling that this will be the making of me.”
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