Maybe it’s because I live in Alabama. Or grew up Methodist. But I read everything by and about Harper Lee. Alabama’s most famous daughter is less mysterious than she was before the posthumous publication of Go Set a Watchman in 2016. But she remains one of the most fascinating figures in American literary history. We catch a few new glimpses into her wit and wisdom from this new collection, introduced by Casey Cep, who wrote one of the most fascinating stories of modern Southern history with her 2019 book Furious Hours.

Cep describes the Lee we see in these stories and essays as a “daughter of the South trying to map its mores onto her emerging morals.” That’s what made Go Set a Watchman so important. We saw Atticus Finch not as the moral titan of young Scout’s imagination but more as a man confused and conflicted, coming to term with his times. Not many of us can relate to the Atticus of Mockingbird. All of us can see ourselves in the Atticus of Watchman.

The eponymous story carries the freight of this collection, opening in Austen-esque fashion: “It is a truth generally acknowledged by the citizens of Maycomb, Alabama, that a single woman in possession of little else but a good knowledge of English social history must be in want of someone to talk to.” No story has ever felt more true to Lee’s particular personality, her defiant individuality and undying loyalty to Maycomb, er, Monroeville, Alabama. True to form the story begins with the unnamed narrator complaining of her married friends whose children “seemed to sap all their energy and imagination.” But it ends with poignant self-awareness, her pleasant surprise.

Maybe you had to grow up in small-town Methodist churches, but Lee left me in stiches when the congregation revolts after the music minister changes the cadence of singing the Doxology. Poor Henry Hackett, by trying to “pep up” the Doxology, he committed the cardinal sin for a tight-knit community: “he was thought to be ambitious.” He should have known better than to listen to a music instructor from New Jersey who wanted to ban Calvinist classics such as “Rock of Ages.” Methodists, “notoriously short on theology and long on good works,” don’t care to be lectured about which hymns they can be allowed to love. Today’s music ministers bent on saving the classics ought to reproduce Lee’s homage of William Cowper: “There is nothing like a blood-curdling hymn to make one feel at home. All sense of isolation withers and dies in the presence of some two hundred sinners earnestly requesting to be plunged beneath a red, redeeming flood.”

Lee can spin a morality tale out of a conversation after church when the narrator just wants to play golf. Her interlocutor, a young man named Talbert on break from Northwestern, “looked suspiciously as if he had returned from a tour and had picked up a Brooks Brothers suit on the way home.” By “bringing her heavy artillery to the front,” she intended to expose his literary defenses as hastily and weakly constructed. As cannon balls bounced off the walls of his formidable learning, she grew harsh in her speech, knowing “she was on losing ground: this boy was somehow outrageously right, insanely correct in his comparisons.”

Humbled, the narrator tried one more trick. Homesick, she says, he must enjoy Faulker. “I find Faulkner completely unreal,” Talbert responded. Smitten, she offered him more coffee—and a round of golf. She never should have doubted, Lee concludes, that “all things happen for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.”