For those of you who don’t already know, Harper Lee died yesterday. Her loss is one that will be felt globally. The twitter response alone after the news broke is emblematic of the amount of lives she touched. As I write this article, there are currently 440 thousand tweets lamenting her death and while nothing in comparison to the current trend #FreeKesha, such support for the death of an 89 year old woman is moving.
At a fleeting glance, with the exception of a birthday and a couple of hours of English classes in year 10, me and Harper Lee appear to share very little. Yet the book To Kill a Mockingbird has succeeded in hacking away at my subconscious ever since I first opened its weary pages many years ago. For a novel which I read under the educational duress of GCSE English, this literary impact was unprecedented.
Much of the power of this book is found in the resonating power of individual lines, which stick in the psyche like a strong adhesive. Most are found in the words of the moral anchor of the novel, Atticus Finch, through the childhood eyes of the young protagonist Scout.
The two most significant quotes of the book are arguably as followed:
“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
Both have appeared all over popular culture and have become staple cultural references in defining our collective morality.I think it is this ability to fix itself in the reader’s soul and refuse to budge which has granted the book it’s durability over the years. The moral instruction of this book is in many ways timeless, which explains the pervasive power of this novel on the English literature syllabus. Indeed when Michael Gove suggested changing the syllabus to include more British literature, it was this novel along with Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which were set up as paragons in defence of a more international education. The outrage that one could even suggest removing To Kill a Mockingbird from reading lists appeared universal. How else could children be expected to learn the value of empathy skills? How did anyone learn true courage before Harper Lee began to write? Such a reaction is a demonstration of the unchallenged position this writer plays on the literary scene.
But of course, To Kill a Mockingbird is not Harper Lee’s only published work. Go Set A Watchman was published in July 2015 and remains buried in controversy. Many readers felt let down by the new presentation of Atticus, which somewhat destroyed the perfect Christ-like figure to which many of us appeared to have become emotionally attached. Yet here for me lies its charm. No perfect hero in literature is ever completely credible and Harper Lee recognised that. She must have been fully aware of the reaction the book would create and thus it is interesting that the book was published so late in life; it was as if to point out, in her final years, that hero-worship is pointless, everyone is imperfect and will ultimately die. And so the author herself did. I cannot imagine a more conclusive end to her story.
On a final note, Harper Lee described the lifeblood of all book lovers everywhere:
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
Indeed all readers of the Cherwell book section, yesterday we lost a sister.
