Expert says documents thought to possibly be another unseen story are from an early version of her most famous book

The “mysterious pages of text” discovered in a safe deposit box in Alabama, which Harper Lee’s lawyer had suggested could be a further novel by the author, are actually typescripts of To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, a rare books expert has said.

In July, Lee’s lawyer Tonja Carter laid out the details of her discovery of Go Set A Watchman, the novel written by Lee before To Kill a Mockingbird but laid aside until it was found by Carter last year, and published this summer. Carter wrote in July in the Wall Street Journal that she found the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman in Lee’s safe deposit box in her home town of Monroeville. She added that it also contained what appeared to be the original Mockingbird manuscript as well as “a stack of a significant number of pages of another typed text”.

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“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,” wrote Carter at the time, adding that experts would be examining and authenticating the documents and “the mysterious pages of text”.

Now rare books expert James S Jaffe, hired by Carter, has provided a full report on the box’s contents. Published online by the Wall Street Journal, Jaffe’s report reveals that the box contained three documents: an original revised and corrected draft of the early sections of To Kill a Mockingbird, an original typescript of Go Set a Watchman, and Lee’s original copy-edited typescript of Mockingbird, including the author’s changes and annotations from her editor.

Jaffe writes that the draft of Mockingbird is “very early”, with “substantial” differences to the published text: the first chapter, for example, opens: “Where did it begin for us”, rather than Lee’s famous published opening line “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

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Jaffe writes in his report that the draft is “an extremely important collection, representing, in effect, the genesis of the novel, with approximately 92 of the 145 pages in this collection bearing substantive revisions by the author”.

He told the WSJ that he did not meet Lee when he looked at the documents on 21 August in Carter’s Monroeville offices.

Go Set a Watchman was published on 14 July. It sold more than 207,000 copies in the UK in its first five days on sale, and more than 1m in the US and Canada.