At one of my recent events, the conversation turned to Harper Lee, mysterious author of To Kill A Mockingbird and subject of the Compassion chapter in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  What’s behind her mystery?  Why, nothing more than the fact that she decided to drop off the face of the earth a few years after her first and only novel became one of the greatest sensations in American letters.

Nelle isn’t the only one of “my” authors who didn’t exactly savor the literary limelight.  Charlotte Brontë didn’t care much for her role as famous author; Louisa May Alcott actively skewered the expectations that came along with her fame in Little Women and its sequels, and Margaret Mitchell claimed to hate being recognized wherever she went.

Now that I have entered a very public phase of my own author-ness, I have to ask…what do they owe us?

Harper Lee faced something a tad more onerous than obligations as a debut author…she was expected to be a literary celebrity, a female writer in a time of male ones, a Southern writer in a slew of New York voices and one whose book was a challenged to established norms of American racism and complacency.  And it shocks me again and again how possessive her readers still are of her, a living writer who has chosen to step out of the limelight.  Is it as bad as it would have been if she hadn’t given us those tantalizing interviews?  Maybe not.  But can we really expect to know everything about her life and her emotions?

Being an author in 2010 is obviously a tad different from being one in 1960 or 1847.  Instead of fan letters and inquisitive callers, there are e-mails to be answered, tweets to attend to, and librarians and indie booksellers to get to know.  I am expected to help promote my own book to the best of my ability, to give of my time as generously as possible and to cultivate relationships with the people I am fortunate enough to connect with through this process.  But I also have the liberty at this phase of my career to decide what I want to reveal and what I don’t. Simply put, I’m lucky enough not to be Harper Lee (as if there could be more than one!).  And this entire process has given me increased respect for the information my favorite authors did choose to reveal…the precious time they chose to give to me, a young woman from the twenty-first century with the chutzpah to read their words in the bathtub, on the bus and on blinky devices.

It may be the classic historian’s question, but next time you think about your favorite author, ask yourself what expectations you are bringing to the table.  We are exceptionally lucky to know what we do about our favorite literary heroines.  I think it’s good to acknowledge that…every once in a while.

*Please don’t construe this post as a complaint about the public nature of my work…it’s a pleasure and a joy! It’s just made me think about these issues from a slightly different perspective.

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.