Harper Lee’s newly discovered short stories set to be published

By Issy Ronald, CNN

(CNN) — For much of Harper Lee’s life, “To Kill a Mockingbird” stood alone as her only major work; her first and, apparently, last novel, narrated by a voice so clear and coherent it seemed impossible that it was her only output.

Then came “Go Set a Watchman,” published shortly before Lee’s death and initially heralded as a sequel, but subsequently seen as more of an early draft of her most famous work than as a new, standalone novel.

So, when eight short stories by Lee were discovered in her New York apartment after she died, it marked an important milestone. Here, finally, was a chance to discover how Lee’s distinctive voice was honed in the years before she wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

These short stories will be published for the first time on Tuesday, in a collection titled “The Land of Sweet Forever,” accompanied by an introduction by Casey Cep, Lee’s biographer.

After dropping out of law school a semester away from completing her degree, Lee moved to New York City to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

It was during this time that she wrote these stories — some containing kernels of the ideas she fully expresses in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” others depicting life navigating New York, according to an article Cep published in the Guardian on Saturday.

“I knew there were unpublished stories, I had no idea where the manuscripts of those stories were,” Lee’s nephew, Edwin Lee Conner, told the BBC.

Conner and his cousin Molly Lee both remember their aunt as a “great storyteller” who would regale them with made-up stories inspired by British author Daphne du Maurier.

“The stories that she told me, she would make them up but they all seemed to be based around, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’… It seemed to me they were always on the moor and she would just take me into the dark,” Molly Lee told the BBC.

And in this collection, they both see their aunt still finding her voice as a writer, albeit with glimpses of her potential.

Conner describes these stories as “apprentice stories,” which aren’t the “fullest expression of her genius — and yet there’s genius in them.”

Alongside these early sketches of stories, the collection also contains eight essays Lee wrote after she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” offering insight into a writer both before and after she completed the work that defined her career.

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