IT MAY SOUND CRUEL, but it is in actual-ity a statement of great achievement. With To Kill a Mockingbird, Nelle Harper Lee cre-ated a novel of such perfection that she ren-dered herself absolutely extraneous. The novel is so much a part of our reading selves, it is so complete in our early introduction to the art of empathy, that its creator has always seemed re-mote.

In this biography, Charles Shields says friends would ask about his subject, “Is Harper Lee still alive?” But for many of us, upon many rereads, the question was somewhat different. It was: “Did she even exist?”

She did. To see, then, an erudite biography of Lee invites contradictory sentiments. There is, first, curiosity. Who is this woman, writer of America’s most widely read novel ever who still divides an inquiring life between her native Al-abama town and New York City? There is hesi-tation.

Isn’t it intrusive? In the years after the novel was published to such success in 1960, Lee fast came to respect her book’s special sta-tus and decided to let it command centrestage.

It is to Shields’ credit that he honours both sentiments. He profiles Lee as the author of a beloved novel, but never does he implicate the reader in intrusive speculation and gossip about a woman who has spent all of her post-Mockingbird years dodging requests for inter-views and talks.

There are two movements in this book — in-deed in Lee’s life as a writer. There is first the making of the writer—her childhood, her friendship with Truman Capote (on whom Dill in the novel is based), her remarkable lawyer father (model for Atticus), her own non-con-formist instincts, her abiding confusion about her reticent, depressive mother. There is her uneasy—and in the end inconclusive—pas-sage though university, trying to realise her fa- ther’s dreams for her to be a lawyer, but drawn to the solitary life of the writer. There is her flight to New York, and years of odd jobs to sus-tain herself, till friends put her to her task by committing to finance one year of her life.

... contd.