How to kill Harper Lee's reputation

Harper Lee was 34 when she published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. The novel was an immediate hit, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, successfully filmed in 1962.

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The book has now sold some 40 million copies around the world and remains widely taught in schools.

Lee, however, published nothing else for the next 55 years and refused all interviews and appearances. Then, in 2015, when she was 89, in a wheelchair in an assisted living facility, almost deaf and blind after a stroke, a new novel suddenly appeared somehow: Go Set a Watchman.

Although presented by the publishers as a stand-alone title, it soon became clear that Watchman was the precursor to Mockingbird, completed in 1957 and bought at the time by a publisher.

In this novel, Scout, Lee's alter ego, returns to "Maycomb" in the mid-1950s, aged 26, and finds her father Atticus to be a segregationist - racist in fact - rather than the adorable white saviour of Mockingbird.