The author is unavailable, her lawyer elusive and for some in the small southern town of Monroeville a second novel is just the latest out-of-character occurrence
Ed Pilkington in Monroeville, Alabama
Friday 6 February 201506.00 EST
For a writer who made her name evoking the brittle frailties of the southern small town of her youth, there's a symmetry to Harper Lee's life today. She spends her days in a modest assisted-living home barely half a mile away from the courthouse where as a child she used to sit watching her father argue before the jury.
In a week in which her name has yet again been emblazoned in headlines, throwing her private life into the global spotlight once more, it is bewildering just how tiny Lee's own personal world has become. Monroeville, Alabama, the community she fictionalised as Maycomb, has closed ranks around her as though reclaiming its most famous citizen.
In the office of the director of the home, there's a file dedicated to the 88-year-old that looks uncannily like the spine of yet another volume by the famously one-book novelist. Nelle Harper Lee, it says in bold type. There's no possibility of talking to her about this week's astounding news, that 55 years after her first rendition of Maycomb a second work, Go Set a Watchman, will appear in July. She is not seated among the residents in the communal area of the home, and the rooms leading off it all have their doors firmly shut. The director explains politely that Lee won't be meeting me today. She takes my card and says: "I can ask her attorney. If she approves, we can see."
Which attorney, I ask.
"Tonja Carter, here in town."
It's no surprise that Lee - Miss Nelle in these parts - is disinclined to receive as lowly a life-form as a reporter. She has spent half a century giving them the runaround.
Perhaps slightly more surprising is the inaccessibility of her lawyer, the gatekeeper, Tonja Carter. In keeping with the claustrophobic small-town feel that Lee captured so vividly in her debut, Carter's office is located in the Monroeville town square. It stands directly opposite the courthouse, just a couple of blocks from Mel's Dairy Dream, a restaurant which today occupies the site of Lee's childhood home, where she lived nextdoor to the young Truman Capote, the inspiration for Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.