J.K. Rowling
She was the penniless single mother who cast a spell on the world and inspired a generation to read. Twenty years since the first ‘Harry Potter’ film, Kathryn Madden examines the life of the chart-topping yet controversial author
Joanne Rowling stood on the cobbled street of Rua Duque de Saldanha, desperately gasping for breath. It was 5am in a dingy quarter of Porto, Portugal, and the 28-year-old was alone in a foreign city, kicked out of home after a heated row with her husband. Her four-month-old baby was sleeping inside with the man she feared, and all she had were the clothes on her back and a few of her nearest possessions – including the first three chapters of a story she’d been writing, scribbled on note paper and stored in a shoebox.
In that moment, as first light hit the hand-painted Portuguese tiles, she wouldn’t dare to dream that the box of notes would one day change her fate. That her story about a boy wizard, Harry Potter, would become the highest-selling book series in history; and that somewhere in the world, someone would start reading a copy every 30 seconds. The introverted redhead would be named the world’s first self-made billionaire author and add Hollywood films, musicals, theme parks and other spin-offs to her CV.
Rowling’s seven-book saga of magic, morality and mortality was not a fairytale. But as the intensely private writer rose from that slummy European street to superstardom, many would come to surmise that her own personal story indeed was.
She was born Joanne Rowling on July 31, 1965, in Yate, south-west England. Her father, Peter, was an aircraft engineer, and met her mother, Anne, while working in the Royal Navy. The family lived in a humble cottage with a cupboard under the stairs, cabinets brimming with books and an enchanting forest just down the road.
Rowling was a serious soul and voracious reader. “I was the epitome of a bookish child – short and squat, thick National Health glasses,” she later said. She’d regularly lead her younger sister, Dianne, in games of witches and wizards, and wrote her first book, titled Rabbit, aged six.
When Rowling was 15, a dark cloud settled over her family. Her beloved mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), and Rowling remembers days when she couldn’t lift the teapot. “Home was a difficult place to be,” she told a BBC radio show.
The head girl, who’d become more outgoing as a teenager, missed out on a place at Oxford, and instead went to Exeter University to study French and Classics. She relished her newfound freedom, descending on pubs and coffee houses with a large group of girlfriends, and had her first serious boyfriend.
“Jo was very shapely and she had this big hair, kind of backcombed and lacquered, and lots of heavy eyeliner,” fellow student Yvette Cowles told biographer Sean Smith. “She liked to party and have a good time. But she did have a serious side and I wonder if this thing of being the life and soul was a cover.”
After university, Rowling decided to move to Manchester to be with her boyfriend. One ordinary day, following a weekend of fruitless flat-hunting, she sat on the train back to London gazing out at the green paddocks and spotty Friesian cows.
Suddenly, Rowling’s carriage was not filled with sleepy commuters, but wide-eyed witches and wizards on their way to boarding school. “The idea for Harry just appeared in my mind’s eye,” she has said. “I can’t tell you why or
“HARRY JUST APPEARED IN MY MIND’S EYE. I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT TRIGGERED IT. I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO EXCITED BY AN IDEA”
what triggered it … I have never been so excited by an idea.”
With no pen or paper, the intricate world of spells and sorcery took shape in her imagination, and by the end of the journey she’d mapped out all the major plotlines and characters.
On December 30, 1990, Anne Rowling died peacefully at home. She was 45. Her oldest daughter felt lost and orphaned, and her grief would go on to profoundly inform her work.
Rowling broke up with her boyfriend and moved to Porto, northern Portugal, for an English teaching job. It was there that she walked into a jazz bar and caught the attention of journalism student Jorge Arantes. He recalled her dark red hair and “amazing” blue eyes, and they bonded over a love of literature.
The couple fell into a passionate but volatile relationship and married at the registry office in October 1992. Rowling wore black and returned to work that afternoon. She quickly fell pregnant, and Jessica Arantes – named after Rowling’s idol, author Jessica Mitford – was born on July 27, 1993. The new mother said it was “without doubt the best moment of my life”.
But Rowling’s relationship was deteriorating, culminating in the explosive blow-up that left her afraid and alone in Portugal. Years later, Arantes told a UK tabloid that he’d dragged her out of the house and “slapped her very hard in the street”.
The next morning, Rowling’s friends collected baby Jessica, and the pair escaped to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Rowling’s sister lived. Her new reality hit hard: she was a 28-year-old single mother on welfare. “I never expected to mess up so badly that I would find myself in an unheated, mouse-infested flat, looking after my daughter,” she later told The Guardian. “I was angry because I felt I was letting her down.”
She was also deeply depressed, but when Arantes arrived from Portugal, she managed to file a restraining order, and then for divorce in August 1994. This marked a turning point for Rowling, and she threw herself back into writing her fantastical saga, acutely aware she had nothing to lose.
Each morning she’d wheel Jessica’s pram up the quaint Royal Mile, then set up for the day in her brother-in-law’s cafe, Nicolson’s. This story is now the stuff of literary legend, albeit embellished: “It’s true that I wrote in cafes with my daughter sleeping beside me. That sounds very romantic but of course it’s not all romantic when you are living through it,” Rowling has said. “The embroidery comes where they say, ‘Well, her flat was unheated.’ I wasn’t in search of warmth. I was just in search of good coffee, frankly, and not having to interrupt the flow by getting up and making myself more.”
The author was finally ready to send off her Harry Potter manuscript, and was initially rejected by 12 publishers – until one landed at Bloomsbury. The house put in a bid, uncontested, and secured the biggest phenomenon in modern literature for £1500.
Rowling travelled to London to meet the team for lunch. Her publisher, Barry Cunningham, smiled, shook her hand and told her, “You’ll never make any money out of children’s books, Jo.”
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published on June 26, 1997. By then, Rowling, 31, was working as a student teacher and there was no great fanfare, though she did spend the day with a copy excitedly tucked under her arm. Notably, her agent believed young boys might not read a book by a woman, hence her pen name (the K initial is a nod to her paternal grandmother, Kathleen).
Soon after, Scholastic Books was tipped off about an exiting new children’s novel and paid $US100,000 for the US rights. It was the beginning of Pottermania, a global phenomenon
“YOU’LL NEVER MAKE ANY MONEY OUT OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS, JO” – Rowling’s first publisher, Barry Cunningham
that captivated kids and adults alike and generated unprecedented commercial success. More than 500 million books sold worldwide, and the blockbuster films grossed $US7.7 billion.
Fame, however – the press, the premieres, the parties – has never come easily to Rowling. “I’m not a natural ‘ta-daaa’ kind of person,” she has said. “I get all uptight about having to do that kind of stuff and I feel like a prat.”
But privately, the author’s life flourished. On Boxing Day 2001, weeks after the first Harry Potter film premiered, Rowling married Neil Murray, a Scottish doctor. They bought a house in the country and had a son, David, in 2003, then a daughter, Mackenzie, in 2005. Rowling turned to philanthropy, particularly focused on causes that support single-parent families and MS research. In 2012, she dropped off the Forbes billionaires list after donating hundreds of millions to charity.
So it was a shock when, after near universal reverence for decades, Rowling was suddenly reviled. In 2020, she tweeted and liked comments implying transgender women were not women, then wrote an essay doubling down on her stance. For the first time, she revealed she was a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, and waded into the contentious debate on transinclusive bathrooms. “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman, you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside,” she wrote. Rowling’s words were condemned as transphobic, and hurt fans lamented that her views were out of step with the inclusive, empowering themes in her books. Ironically, the millennials once dubbed the “Potter generation” were turning on the woman who’d made them.
In July 2020, Rowling was one of 150 public figures who signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine condemning attacks on free speech. The author was effectively “cancelled”, although Bloomsbury reported that print sales of Harry Potter increased by 8 per cent between July and September that year. Meanwhile, her latest work of adult fiction under the pseudonym Robert
Galbraith was a bestseller, and she’s just released an illustrated children’s book, The Christmas Pig.
But never again will a story or character absorb her like Harry. In 2006, Rowling went to The Balmoral, the most luxurious hotel in Edinburgh, to pen the final chapters of the series. “I finished it. Bawled my eyes out.
Went to the minibar. Had one of those pathetic half bottles of champagne – it’s not very rock’n’roll, that – and downed it. Went home covered in mascara and a little bit drunk,” she has recalled. “Any writer finishing a book will know what I mean when I say you’ve lived a parallel existence and suddenly the door closes, it’s over.
But for me it was 17 years … I was writing Harry Potter the night my mother died. It was a connection to a very different time of my life.”
Some say Harry Potter was Rowling’s attempt to reclaim her youth, and in 2011 she quietly purchased her childhood home. Just like her orphan wizard, her life has been threaded with a sense of longing and sorrow, evident in a 2007 television interview. When asked what she still wants to achieve, Rowling blinked, let out a sombre laugh, and said simply, “I want to get better.”