Details of the difficult years between Potter's conception and his prodigious birth have always been heartily exaggerated in the press, with Rowling portrayed as a penniless nobody of Dickensian proportions (she and her daughter lived in a draughty two-bedroom flat in Edinburgh, not a freezing bedsit). The relationship soured a little as she struggled with her newfound celebrity — dissatisfied reporters found her dour and stand-offish — but now Rowling is firmly back in public favor.
Her interviews and public appearances are very carefully limited these days, and since her Portuguese ex-husband sold his story to the Mail on Sunday in 1999, there has been precious little indiscretion from the people who know her intimately.
In spite of all the bin-raking and long-lens photography, Rowling's private life has been guarded almost as assiduously as her beloved literary secrets, and because she has resisted exposure, whenever she does get involved with any cause, it becomes big news. For instance, earlier this year Rowling made waves when she went to Bucharest to raise funds for the Children's High Level Group, an organization dedicated to enforcing the human rights of children. It's not like she's a Pynchon or a Salinger, though. We know where she lives (a house in Edinburgh, another in Perthshire and a third in London). We have the basic details about her life (middle-class family; French and classics at Exeter; unhappy first marriage; a daughter; happy second marriage, to an anesthetist; two sons). Rowling would be the first to admit she's perfectly ordinary, but because the public doesn't have easy access to her, a tiny sparkle of magic is preserved.
People have wondered, with some justification, why Potter himself has been rewarded with such spectacular and enduring popularity. Take the formula apart and you will find nothing that hasn't been written before. Indeed, Rowling makes no effort to deny that her books are derivative: “I've taken horrible liberties with folklore and mythology,” she says. “But I'm quite unashamed about that.”
However, there is no questioning the fertility of her imagination. She has stories coming out of her ears, so much so there are moments when plot developments hit the reader so fast it's a struggle to draw breath and the bounty can seem excessive. AS Byatt has weighed in against the oeuvre, arguing that: “Ms. Rowling's magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons and the exaggerated [more exciting, not threatening] mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” Critic Harold Bloom lamented that: “Harry Potter will not lead our children on to Kipling's Just So Stories or his Jungle Book. It will not lead them to Thurber's Thirteen Clocks or Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows or Lewis Carroll's Alice.”
Both criticisms fall short of the mark. The Potter series does become progressively darker and more serious in tone, and in response to certain religious groups which have marked the books out as unsuitable reading material for children, Rowling has emphasized the importance of confronting fear early on: “That's a very important part of growing up, I think.” One might concede that Harry Potter is not great literature. But to witness the sheer pervasiveness of its appeal, which pays no attention to age, gender, language or cultural differences, and still to claim that it has little merit seems hugely wrong-headed.
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