A will signed by Harper Lee eight days before her death has been unsealed by an Alabama court, after the New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit arguing that the document should be a matter of public record.

The will was sealed in 2016, after Lee’s lawyer and personal representative Tonja Carter – a controversial figure since the publication of Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, a manuscript Carter said she discovered in a safe deposit box in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville – cited the author’s desire for privacy in court.

“As the Court is no doubt aware, Ms Lee highly valued her privacy,” Carter’s lawyers wrote at the time. “She did not wish for her private financial affairs to be matters of public discussion. Ms Lee left a considerable legacy for the public in her published works; it is not the public’s business what private legacy she left for the beneficiaries of her will.”

Lee’s estate had argued that if the will were to be made public, it could result in the “potential harassment” of those named in it. Her family had also wanted the will to remain private, according to the NYT.

But the NYT’s lawyers argued that Lee’s concerns about her privacy “were no different from those of others whose wills are processed through the court system”. Archie Reeves, representing the NYT in the lawsuit, said: “It’s a public record, and the press and the public have a right to public records.”

The paper reported that as both it and the estate prepared witnesses for the case, the estate withdrew its opposition and allowed the will to be made public. But, according to the paper, the unsealing of a document it described as “strikingly opaque” has “only deepened” the mystery around Lee.

Fiercely private, Lee published one of the 20th century’s most enduring works of fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird, in 1960. It was her first novel, and despite its popularity she did not release another – until 2015, when her publisher Penguin Random House announced that Carter had discovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman, “in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird”.

After dismissing the idea of publishing another book for years, concerns were raised over Lee’s seeming about-turn over the manuscript’s publication. The state of Alabama investigated whether or not the then-88-year-old had been a victim of elder abuse, but the allegations were ruled to have been unfounded.

Lee’s unsealed will sheds little light on the situation. The NYT reports that it was signed on 11 February 2016, eight days before her death, and that it “directed that the bulk of her assets, including her literary properties, be transferred into a trust she formed in 2011”; the Mockingbird Trust, of which Carter was one of two trustees.

As trust documents are private, details of the future of Lee’s literary papers – and if there are any other unpublished manuscripts waiting to be discovered – remain unknown. In a piece for the Wall Street Journal in 2015, Carter alluded to a possible, third manuscript and wrote that experts would be invited to “examine and authenticate” all the safe deposit box’s documents.

The court papers do reveal that Lee’s heirs are her niece and three nephews, who will “receive an undisclosed portion of the estate through the trust”, said the NYT. And Carter – who told the paper “I will not discuss her affairs” – is named as the estate’s executor, or personal representative, and has been given “wide-ranging powers” over the estate and Lee’s writings.

Court documents seen by the NYT also show that To Kill a Mockingbird generates around $3m a year in royalties for the copyright holder.

Following her death in 2016, Lee’s estate moved to block publication of cheap paperback copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, but approved posthumous projects including a graphic novel of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a major tourist attraction in Monroeville. What Lee herself would have made of such developments is unclear; in a 1993 letter to a friend, she complained of “a new holiday sport in Monroeville … That of people bringing their visiting relatives to look at me.”

One of Lee’s former carers, Cynthia McMillan, told the NYT that Lee had been “cogent”, as the paper described it, when signing the will. “In my opinion, she was,” McMillan said.