Tonja Carter, writing of how she found To Kill a Mockingbird’s ‘parent novel’ Go Set a Watchman, says a third typescript might be another book

Harper Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter, the woman at the centre of the mysteries surrounding Go Set a Watchman’s publication this week, has broken her silence. In a lengthy piece in the Wall Street Journal, she intimates that there may be a third novel by Lee residing in a safe-deposit box in her home town of Monroeville, Alabama.

Carter discovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman in the autumn of 2014, according to the initial announcement about the novel’s publication. It was, said Lee’s publishers, “considered to have been lost until … Carter discovered it in a secure location where it had been affixed to an original typescript of To Kill a Mockingbird”. She passed it on to Lee’s agent Andrew Nurnberg, and has also been the conduit for public statements from the 89-year-old author. Nurnberg told the Guardian last week that she had been “pilloried” over her role, particularly in the wake of a New York Times story which suggested she could have been present at a meeting in 2011 where the manuscript was uncovered by an expert from Sotheby’s.

Harper Lee’s new novel: read the first chapter Read more

Carter has said little to clarify matters until this point, but in a 1,500-word piece published on Monday by the Wall Street Journal, which shares a parent company with Lee’s American publisher HarperCollins, she laid out in detail for the first time how she discovered the manuscript, describing herself as an “otherwise unknown” person placed by chance at the centre of public attention.

Much, she writes, has been said since February about “how [Watchman] was found, who found it, who knew of its existence, and when it was first found”, and “as Nelle’s estate trustee, lawyer and friend, I would like to tell the full story, fill in any blanks that may be in people’s minds, and provide a historical context for those interested in how this book went from lost to being found”.

She relates her version of the 2011 meeting highlighted by the New York Times, in which Lee’s former literary agent Sam Pinkus set up a meeting with Sotheby’s appraiser Justin Caldwell to examine the novelist’s assets. Pinkus, Caldwell and Carter were all present at the meeting.

“Nelle’s safe-deposit box contained several items, including an old cardboard box from Lord & Taylor and a heavy, partially opened but tightly wrapped mailing envelope sent from Lippincott, the original publishers of To Kill a Mockingbird, to Alice Lee and postmarked Jan 3, 1961,” Carter writes.

She said that the Lord & Taylor box contained “several hundred pages of typed original manuscript”, which appeared to be a later chapter in Mockingbird; she was asked to find a copy of Mockingbird to compare with the manuscript, and after handing one to the two men, left the meeting.

Later follow-up from both Caldwell and Pinkus did not mention the existence of a second, unknown book, she writes, and the New York Times’s version of events describes them “in ways very different from how I remember them and in ways not reflecting the emails sent to me by Mr Pinkus and Mr Caldwell”.

Carter admits that she did see a reference in the pages of manuscript she read to a character named Hank – who is shown in the first chapter of Watchman to be a childhood friend of Jean Louise Finch’s brother Jem, whom she is “almost” in love with.

Go Set a Watchman review – more complex than To Kill a Mockingbird, but less compelling Read more

Carter, however, assumed that Hank was a character from an early draft of Mockingbird. According to her account in the Wall Street Journal, it wasn’t until summer 2014 that she heard at a family gathering that Lee had actually written another novel. Looking again at the pages in the safe-deposit box, she found Go Set a Watchman.

“I immediately went to Nelle,” she writes. “I said, ‘Nelle, when I was in the safe-deposit box, I found something’. She said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘It’s a manuscript of a novel called Go Set the Watchman.’ She said, ‘It’s ‘Go Set a Watchman.’ ”

“I asked, ‘Is it finished?’ Nelle replied, ‘I guess it’s finished, it’s the parent of Mockingbird.’” Carter adds that she asked for, and received, permission to read it.

Carter reveals at the end of her piece that she returned last week to the safe-deposit box to see if there were any “other things hiding in plain sight”.

“What we found was extraordinary and surprised even me,” she writes. “Remember the partially opened mailer from Lippincott that the publisher had sent to Alice Lee in 1961? Well, my colleague very carefully removed its contents, which were about 300 pages of typed manuscript. It was clear to us that what was in the package had not been removed since it was first mailed.”

The pages, she said, appear to be the original manuscript of Mockingbird. And Watchman itself, she writes, was sitting “underneath a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text”.

“Was it an earlier draft of ‘Watchman’, or of ‘Mockingbird’, or even, as early correspondence indicates it might be, a third book bridging the two? I don’t know,” said Carter, adding that “experts, at Nelle’s direction” are now going to be invited to “examine and authenticate” all the safe-deposit box’s documents.