Death, divorce and the darkly painful history behind Harry Potter
20 years ago, a magical book hit the shelves, the start of a phenomenon that would make its unknown writer, one Joanne Rowling, a billionaire
ONE morning in 1996 in a cramped office in Fulham, West London, a 26-yearold administrative manager named Bryony Evens sat down to open the day’s post.
There, among the letters, was a distinctive black folder containing three chapters of a children’s novel. Evens nearly threw it away. The Christopher Little Agency rarely handled children’s books, particularly by unknown authors. Nevertheless she was intrigued and, when she read the first page, knew she had stumbled onto something remarkable.
By the time the agency received the full manuscript from the author, an Edinburgh woman named Joanne Rowling, there was a palpable sense of excitement about the story of the boy wizard and his enchanted boarding school.
‘When it came, I just couldn’t put it down,’ Evens said years later. ‘I had already decided that, even if we had rejected it, I was going to read the rest of it for my own curiosity.’
Fortunately for Rowling and children everywhere, it wasn’t. Instead Little sent the manuscript out to various publishers, and it was accepted by Bloomsbury for a modest £3,500 advance. On June 26, 1997, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone rolled off the presses for the very first time, with a tiny print run of 500 copies.
Yet while the events of that day 20 years ago were to change the lives of countless millions, not least that of Rowling herself, the true origins of the Harry Potter story are steeped in a darker and more personal incident, one that rarely makes it into the perky biographies.
It was on New Year’s Day 1991 that Rowling’s beloved mother Anne died after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis. She was only 45 years old and had spent her last two years in a wheelchair. Rowling was 25 and her mother’s illness had cast a long shadow over her teenage years.
‘It was dealing with the daily reality of somebody who’s starting not to be able to walk as well as they had, and for such an active person that was a real privation,’ Rowling said once.
‘She always seemed very young. She was very fit, she was a non-smoker, non-drinker, and I say all of this because of course then for her to be diagnosed at 35 with an illness that would kill her was just the most enormous shock to us and everyone who knew her.’
SIX months before her mother’s death, while sitting on a delayed train from Manchester to London, Rowling had started writing the story of Harry Potter.
‘The idea for Harry Potter fell into my head,’ she said once. ‘I had been writing since I was six, but I had never been as excited about an idea as I was for this book. Coincidentally, I didn’t have a pen and was too shy to ask anyone for one on the train, which frustrated me at the time, but when I look back it was the best thing for me. It gave me the full four hours on the train to think up all the ideas for the book.’
That her mother, an avid reader, never knew she had started a novel that would go on to change the face of children’s literature and turn Rowling into a multi-millionaire (she confesses to having been ‘secretive’ about her work in the early days), is one of her greatest regrets.
‘That is painful,’ she told BBC 4’s Woman’s Hour. ‘I wish she’d known.’
Rowling’s mother’s death changed both the budding writer and the character of Harry Potter. A few months after Anne died, Rowling packed up her things and moved to Portugal for a fresh start, where she became an English teacher.
‘I took my manuscript with me in hopes of working on it while I was there. My feelings about Harry Potter’s parents’ death became more real to me, and more emotional.
‘In my first week in Portugal, I wrote my favourite chapter in Philosopher’s Stone – The Mirror of Erised.’
The Mirror of Erised – the mirror of desire – is a poignant chapter in which Rowling describes the orphaned Harry seeing himself in a magical mirror surrounded by his dead parents and relatives. It was, perhaps, a reflection of Rowling’s own deepest desires. Harry, the conflicted orphan whose actions are driven by a sense of loneliness and the desire to avenge his parents’ deaths by the evil villain Voldemort, was born.
This thread of grief and loss, although tightly woven throughout the Harry Potter series, is often missed by readers, even though Rowling herself has admitted its significance.
‘My books are largely about death,’ she said in an interview. ‘I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it.’
It is perhaps unsurprising that Rowling has attempted to live out unresolved issues from her own life in her books. Her friend, fellow Edinburgh writer Ian Rankin, observes that Rowling enjoys the element of control fiction writing gives her. In her writing she retains ‘the power of life and death over these characters,’ he said once. He said too that she is wary ‘of situations you can’t always control in the real world’.
This would appear to have been the case even at a young age.
FROM a comfortably middle class background (her father Peter was an engineer at Rolls-Royce), Rowling spent her earliest years near Bristol before moving to a village on the edge of the Forest of Dean.
‘I lived for books,’ she said. ‘I was your basic common-or-garden bookworm, complete with freckles and National Health spectacles.
‘As soon as I knew what writers were, I wanted to be one. I’ve got the perfect temperament for a writer; perfectly happy alone in a room, making things up.’
She wrote her first novel at the age of six. It was, she says, ‘…a work of towering genius about a rabbit, called Rabbit. I gave it to my mother who said, “That’s lovely,” as a mother would. “That’s very, very good.” I stood there, thinking, “Well, get it published then.” Bit of an odd thing for a child of six to think.’
Rowling has always been tight-lipped about her relationship with her father Peter, who remarried two years after her mother’s death. She remarked once that she ‘did not have an easy relationship’ with him, and in 2012 stated that they had not had any communication ‘for about nine years’.
The relationship cannot have been helped by the fact that, in 2003, Peter Rowling offered a collection of Harry Potter first editions for sale at Sotheby’s, including one given to him on Fathers’ Day 2000 and signed ‘lots of love from your first born’.
Four of the seven novels fetched £50,000, while the rest failed to reach their reserve price.
Escaping her difficult home life at the age of 18, Rowling went to university in Exeter (she took entrance exams for Oxford but failed to get in) where she studied French in a period she later wrote off as having done ‘no work whatsoever’.
From there she drifted into a job with Amnesty International and then, following her mother’s death, to Portugal. There she married Jorge Arantes after a brief and, by his own description, ‘tempestuous’ relationship.
‘We were always either in heaven or hell,’ he said once. In 1993, Rowling gave birth to a daughter, Jessica, named after the rebellious Left-wing Mitford sister who ran away to fight in the Spanish Civil War. But the relationship was doomed. Speaking in 2000, Arantes claimed he kicked her out of their apartment when Jessica was two months old.
‘She refused to go without Jessica and, despite my saying she could come back for her in the morning, there was a violent struggle,’ he said.
‘I had to drag her out of the house at five in the morning, and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street.’
Penniless and heartbroken, Rowling returned to the UK in late 1993 and moved to Edinburgh, where her sister lived. Living on benefits and often having to choose between food for herself and her baby, her life had hit rock bottom.
‘An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded and I was jobless, a lone parent and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless... By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,’ she said once. She had hit rock bottom. ‘We’re talking suicidal thoughts here; we’re not talking “I’m a bit miserable,”’ she told an Edinburgh student magazine in 2008.
She credits her baby daughter with pushing her into getting help. ‘[She] gave me the impetus to go and say to a doctor, “I think I’m not quite right and I need some help here.” Having done that made a massive difference.’
With her head clearer, she pushed herself into writing and over the next three years, dedicated herself to her novel. ‘Having that child forced me to finish the bloody book. Not because I thought it was going to save us but because I thought it was going to be my last chance to finish it.’
The image of Rowling writing in Edinburgh café Nicolsons (now a bistro), making one espresso last two hours while her baby daughter slept next to her in her pram, is one that has become a legendary part of the Rowling canon, as familiar to her readers as Harry’s invisibility cloak.
In 1996, she posted off that black folder with the first three chapters of her book to Christopher Little. That Rowling even chose Little seems a touch magical in itself. After receiving one rejection, the legend goes that she walked into a public library in Edinburgh, looked up a list of literary agents, and settled on Christopher Little because she thought he sounded like a character from a children’s book.
AT Bloomsbury, Rowling’s editor warned her she would be unlikely to make a living from children’s books and suggested she get a teaching job. Yet three days after the UK publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, publisher Scholastic bid $100,000 dollars for the US rights to the book, an unprecedented amount for a children’s novel. The Harry Potter legend was born.
Today Rowling is a multi-millionaire beloved around the world, a one-woman writing phenomenon whose seven Harry Potter books have been turned into blockbuster movies, computer games and theme parks. She has founded charities, championed causes, opened a multi-millionpound research centre into multiple sclerosis in Edinburgh and had every aspect of her life, both public and private, pored over like a book.
How this sits with the once bespectacled bookworm is debatable. She has always been shy and reserved – ‘thin-skinned’ is how the New Yorker described her in a 2012 interview – and perhaps uncomfortable with the personal impact of what she has created. Ian Rankin describes her as ‘quite quiet, quite introspective’.
‘I do have this compulsion to try to make things better, and at the same time I would quite like to sit in a room and write books, which is my idea of enjoying the world,’ she said once. ‘So yes, I am quite conflicted in that.’
Conflicted or not, 20 years on she has changed not just her own life but the world of children’s books for ever.