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I’ve heard that Harper Lee is ailing and in an assisted living facility. And that she didn’t authorize this publication.

Did she sell the rights to this book years ago, and now whoever owned the rights decided now was the time to publish it? How did this get published here and now, without the author’s consent?????

Monday or Tuesday there was an article - op-ed - in the Walls Street Journal by a lifelong friend (taking her word) of Harper Lee, claiming that she was present when Lee’s Safe Deposit Box was opened, and that the two people who wanted it opened had Lee’s consent. They had Lee’s consent - she lives in an assisted living facility, but apparently is coherent enough for her consent to be meaningful.
According to that telling, the two seekers were after the manuscript of Mockingbird, but apparently weren’t very diligent/determined, for they came up empty. The op-ed author says that it was later that she heard other info which led her back to that lockbox (with Lee’s consent) and to her discovery of the manuscript of Watchman. Having been enthralled by it, she got Lee’s consent to show it to Lee’s agent - and that agent got Lee’s consent to publish Watchman.
The same article asserted that the writer had gone back to the lockbox a third time “Thursday” - making it “breaking” news - and found the original manuscript of Mockingbird, tightly wrapped in a package which had not been (fully) opened when received, and - on the basis of the fact that it could not as a practical matter have been reinserted into such a tight package without damaging it - obviously had not been opened by the two original seekers for that manuscript.
I don’t even have a clear recollection of having ever read Mockingbird. only reviews of it, and I think I caught a snatch of the movie on TV. So I hardly consider myself an expert, but based on the reviews it appears that in both Mockingbird and Watchman the central voice (i.e., the voice of Harper Lee) is that “Scout.” “Scout” is the same person, in Watchman grown up to be an aspiring painter ( in “contrast” to the writer Harper Lee) as she was in Mockingbird. I see no reason to assert that Atticus Finch is not the same character, either. Dedicated to fairness and the rule of law - but in the 1930s of the then-conventional opinion that ~~blacks~~ negroes, as the polite term then was were not “ready for white ways.” Same character not necessarily out of place in showing hostility to Brown v. Board of Education.
On the basis of the reviews, it does not seem at all necessary to consider the Atticus Finch of Watchman to be a different character than the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird. The “problem” presented by the Atticus Finch of Watchman is that “liberals” are invested in Atticus Finch as portrayed by Gregory Peck - and they don’t want him to be the Atticus Finch of Watchman. It’s their problem, not mine. As I see it. Watchman shows the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird to be a “liberal” cardboard character.