From The erasure of JK Rowling
“given the degree to which her integration of ancient lore, magic and mythology with her own fantastical imagination won Rowling her pre-eminent place in the hearts of millions of young readers worldwide, it’s remarkable that her continuing ability to trend on Twitter rests primarily on her insistence on a position that would have been regarded as utterly banal in any other time. Namely, that the word ‘woman’ refers primarily to a state of biological being, rather than a state of mind.”
“various attempts to cancel the woman who famously lost billionaire status only because she gave too much of her money away have pinged gratifyingly off the force field of her not giving a fuck.”
“God-given genius – even in the lower-case sense of mysterious creative spirit – is indeed an unfashionable idea, and there are those who see it as an intolerable affront to the egalitarian ideal.”
“It suggests a quite psychotic detachment from the reality of the creative process, this attempt to actually remove a living author from their creation, to sort of float her free, like a decal transfer from its backing paper. What exactly is the preferred scenario? To pretend that all JK Rowling did was refurbish some sort of pre-existing mythos, like those re-workings of Homeric or Arthurian legend for modern readers? Or that Hogwarts was really a collaborative effort that sprang into being on Warner Bros’ watch, more meaningfully emanating from the genius of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson than from Rowling herself?”
“Rowling’s assertion, for instance, of the legitimacy of Slytherin House, as part of the magical community, and of Professor Snape in particular, suggests she grasped the necessary acknowledgement of the shadow side, to create an integrated personality.”
“To practise that most wonderfully therapeutic of disciplines: gratitude. To be grateful that you do live in a society that made her creations possible. To be thankful that the combination of qualities – courage to speak her truth, surely among them – that allowed JK Rowling and no one else to give the world Harry Potter, happened along in their lifetimes.”
