I have a terrible confession to make:  I didn’t read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school, or junior high, or elementary school…or until I was a grown woman.

I’m not sure if it’s because I missed 11th grade English (I was an exchange student in Germany that year) or what, but the book never entered my consciousness until I was already an adult.  Of course, it had been in the public consciousness for a long, long, time by then.  Harper Lee was already the shy, hidden queen of American letters.  Everyone already knew what the words “Scout” and “Atticus” meant.  Except for me.

I read Mockingbird eventually, and I loved it, enough to include it in the slender list of 12 books that make up The Heroine’s Bookshelf. Aside from Mary Lennox, Scout Finch is the youngest heroine of the lot, her creator the most mysterious.  And she’s arguably the one with the widest and most vocal audience, though many would think of Atticus as the book’s hero.

A heady, proud, almost sick with pleasure and agony feeling steals over me whenever I let myself think of all that this book meant in the past and means today.  Think about what it really signified, fifty years ago.  Of course, we wouldn’t have the book at all if Nelle Harper Lee had not failed to be a little lady like her Scout.  When you talk about her, it’s hard not to get caught up in something like resentment for speaking so strongly one time, then being content to take a backseat to her book.  I try to remind myself that as much as I’d like to sit on a porch with Harper Lee, that’s a privilege it’s her right to withhold.  I’ll content myself to having written about her, fifty years on.

Learn more about To Kill A Mockingbird at its 50th anniversary site.

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