Go Set a Watchman has a certain promise, but not much more. At the end, Jean Louise’s uncle Jack, having improbably quoted EM Forster, reveals, in a novelettish twist, the dark truth of his obsession with her. This is still a debut: often stilted, uneven and awkward. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl”. On page 109, the reader learns that Atticus had once “accomplished what was never before or afterwards done in Maycomb County: he won the acquittal for a coloured boy on a rape charge. The most vivid passages, which are fleeting, concern twentysomething Miss Finch’s recollections of childhood and her brother, Jem, who is now dead. Told in the third person, the novel traces Jean Louise’s painful coming to terms with her roots. This manuscript was a “fish out of water” story about a young woman from the deep south who, going home, is confronted by the racist attitudes of Atticus Finch, her father, who associates with the KKK, and Henry (“Hank”) Clinton, her “white trash” boyfriend. The genesis of Go Set a Watchman is mysterious but in 1957, Lee’s agent submitted it to publishers as “an eye-opener for many northerners in the segregation battle”, and it was signed up by Tay Hohoff, an editor at JB Lippincott. At one point, she threw the manuscript out of her apartment window into the snow.
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