“If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he
treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
J. K. Rowling
Although she writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling, pronounced like rolling, her name
when her first Harry Potter book was published was simply Joanne Rowling.
Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a
book written by a woman, her publishers demanded that she use two initials,
rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K as the second initial of her pen name,
from her paternal grandmother Kathleen Ada Bulgen Rowling. She calls herself Jo and has said, "No one ever called
me 'Joanne' when I was young, unless they were angry." Following her
marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when
conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence
under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling. In a 2012 interview, Rowling
noted that she no longer cared that people pronounced her name incorrectly.
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling, a Rolls-Royce aircraft engineer, and
Anne Rowling (née Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England,
10 miles (16 km) northeast of Bristol. Her mother Anne was half-French and
half-Scottish. Her parents first met on a train departing from King's Cross
Station bound for Arbroath in 1964. They married on 14 March 1965. Her mother's
maternal grandfather, Dugald Campbell, was born in Lamlash on the Isle of
Arran. Her mother's paternal grandfather, Louis Volant, was awarded the Croix
de Guerre for exceptional bravery in defending the village of Corellas-le-Comte
during the First World War.
Rowling's sister Dianne was born at their home when Rowling was 23 months old.
The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She
attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William
Wilberforce and education reformer Hannah More. Her headmaster at St Michael's,
Alfred Dunn, has been suggested as the inspiration for the Harry Potter headmaster
Albus Dumbledore.
As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would usually then
read to her sister. She recalls that: "I can still remember me telling her
a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the
rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I
was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited
by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." At the age of
nine, Rowling moved to Church Cottage in the Gloucestershire village of
Tutshill, close to Chepstow, Wales. When she was a young teenager, her great
aunt, who Rowling said "taught classics and approved of a thirst for
knowledge, even of a questionable kind," gave her a very old copy of
Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford
became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.
Rowling has said of her teenage years, in an interview with The New Yorker,
"I wasn't particularly happy. I think it’s a dreadful time of life."
She had a difficult home life; her mother was ill and she had a difficult
relationship with her father (she is no longer on speaking terms with him). She
attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother had
worked as a technician in the science department. Rowling said of her
adolescence, "Hermione [a bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character]
is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm
not particularly proud of." Steve Eddy, who taught Rowling English when
she first arrived, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one
of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English." Sean
Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which
she says inspired the one in her books.(less)
