I've often wondered about the role that paternal distancing perceived as heartbreaking rejection by a once-doted upon daughter might've played in the very different way Atticus Finch is portrayed in Harper Lee's two American novels about him and Scout.

In "To Kill A Mockingbird," Scout is a little girl and the apple of her dad's eye - and she in turn perceives and portrays her dad in a favorable light, as a paragon of virtue, a progressive and an anti-racist. In "Go Set A Watchman," Scout is 26, now goes by her birth certificate name Jean Louise, and she sees her dad Atticus in a much more negative light. In her adult eyes, Atticus is a racist segregationist who believes that "states rights" give the whites who control and live in the US Southern states should not be bound by the rulings of the US Supreme Court, and that the federal government should not intervene in the South on behalf of black people's civil rights.

I know that both novels were written when Harper Lee was an adult, and that "Watchman" was written before "Mockingbird," though "Mockingbird" is the only one Lee chose to publish. "Mockingbird" came out in 1960, and "Watchman" was only published 55 years later - after Lee's death, without her consent and perhaps against her wishes.

One of the things that really struck me about the two books is that the POV and feelings of Scout/JeanLouise towards her father seem to have shifted enormously from one book to the other, as Michiko Kakutani noted in the NY Times:

"Somewhere along the way, the overarching impulse behind the writing also seems to have changed. Watchman reads as if it were fueled by the alienation of a native daughter—who, like Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City—might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people's enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement roiled things up, making people who "used to trust each other" now "watch each other like hawks

"Mockingbird, in contrast, represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship (which a relative in Watchman suggests has kept Jean Louise from fully becoming her own person) and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory."