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Alice Finch Lee | Lawyer, author's sister, 103

Alice Finch Lee, 103, who practiced law for seven decades and spent much of her long life shielding her sister, the writer Harper Lee, from a prying public, died Nov. 17 in Monroeville, Ala., of natural causes.

Alice Finch Lee, 103, who practiced law for seven decades and spent much of her long life shielding her sister, the writer Harper Lee, from a prying public, died Nov. 17 in Monroeville, Ala., of natural causes.

Like her sister, she was inspired by their father, Amasa Coleman Lee. A country lawyer, he was Harper's model for Atticus Finch, the morally steadfast protagonist who defends a black man unjustly accused of raping a white woman in To Kill a Mockingbird.

A leader in the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, Miss Lee quietly but firmly helped guide it through the discord of the civil rights era.

She generally refused to talk about her sister but made an exception when batting down rumors, particularly speculation that Truman Capote, a childhood friend, was the true author of Mockingbird. "That's the biggest lie ever told," Miss Lee told Newsday in 2002. Capote, she said, was jealous of her sister because he never won a Pulitzer. - L.A. Times