Joanne Rowling was born in Yate to her mother Anne and her father Peter. Her mother was of French and Scottish descent. Her father was an engineer for Rolls Royce in Bristol at this time, which is located a few miles south of Yate. They met in London on a train as it left King's Cross Station. Peter Rowling moved his entire family to the nearby village of Winterbourne. Jo has a older sister named Di. During the family's residence in Winterbourne, Jo and Di Rowling were friends with neighborhood children, Ian and Vikki Potter. When Rowling was younger she was a bit of a daydreamer and started writing stories when she was six years old. After leaving Exeter University, she began teaching but she really wanted to become a writer. One afternoon Rowling was stuck on a delayed train for hours she came up with her infamous character Harry Potter. It took her six years to write her first novel which was a huge success. In the six years she was writing her book, she moved to Portugal, got married, and had a daughter named Jessica. She divorced her husband and moved closer to her sister when Jessica was only three months old. She then finished Harry Potter and was waiting for it to be published. It was finally published by Bloomsbury after several publishers passed it by. Like so many other authors, Rowling wrote about her life and what she knew. Most of her inspiration for her characters names, objects, and towns, came from her own life growing up. She collected all that she had acquired throughout her life and made it into something magical. Virginia Woolf was famous for writing about her life in “To the Lighthouse” and about her father in “Daddy”. These women write about what they know and what they know the most is about them and their past. When Rowling first started writing she did not want anyone to see it until her work was finished. She sometimes wrote in a little coffee shop that was owned by someone she knew in the corner. Jane Austin wrote in a similar environment. She wrote in a common room and hid her work often when someone would enter. Both of these ladies knew they were pushing the envelope for their time and they wanted it to be just right before presenting it to the world. Her first book Harry Potter is a children’s book and it is number one in a seven book series.
Images from: http://www.mugglenet.com/jk.shtml I feel that a lot of Rowling’s work is magic realism/post colonial work. Rowling’s writing is directed toward a younger generation. Some of the things in her novel are believable and some are not so believable. Rowling really has a way of captivating her audiences and have them coming back for more and more. An excellent quality in a writer is to grab the reader’s attention from the start and keep it through the entire book. Rowling has done this with ease and did with a series of books. A major theme that I caught when I read her books is that her characters a British accent. Rowling stays true to her roots and incorporates her life and feelings into her work. I think the accent brings a flare into her work that a lot of other pieces are missing. For Americans, it is new and exciting to an accent and to learn about other people’s life.Study Questions
Refrences
Everything about Harry Potter
All About J. K. Rowling
