Harry Potter’s bespectacled face has been gazing worriedly from so many millions of book covers and film posters that it is hard to imagine that 21 years ago he existed only in the mind of one woman.
Even now, J. K. Rowling finds it hard to fathom the cultural impact that her boy wizard has made, both on the fans of her books and on herself. She has gone from being an unknown to the most successful living author [with the possible exception of Danielle Steel] despite having written only seven novels and a couple of spin-offs.
Her humble beginnings have been exaggerated, but it is true that she was a single mother on benefits when writing the first book, often in Edinburgh cafés such as Nicolson’s, off Princes Street.
It was not because her flat was unheated, as has been reported, but because going for a walk was the best way of getting her baby daughter, Jessica, to sleep.
“It’s the most soul-destroying thing,” she once said of living on benefits. “I don’t want to dramatise but there were nights when, though Jessica [her daughter] ate, I didn’t.”
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It lasted six months before she got a part-time job and a grant from the Scottish Arts Council for £8,000 that gave her time to write in earnest.
She first thought of Harry when stuck on a train in 1990. The moment she got to her South London home, she wrote the ideas down.
When her mother died that year, she moved to Portugal to teach English. There she wrote what became the first three chapters of Harry Potter while also finding a Portuguese husband and becoming pregnant. The marriage fell apart within 13 months.
She moved near her sister in Edinburgh, where she finished the saga in 2007.
Rowling’s story of a gifted boy who goes to a boarding school for wizards was not original (Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life had the same premise 20 years earlier) but the world she created was so beautifully crafted that her children’s book also captivated adults.
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By the time of the fourth book in the series, her fans were so numerous that publicity generated itself. Each successive book broke world records for speed of sales and the juggernaut has not stopped rolling since.