The years between 1917 and 1930 form the first period

Introduction
The years between 1917 and 1930 form the first period. This was the time when the crisis of the bourgeois world reached its highest point and revolutions took place in several countries in Russia, in Germany and in Hungary. The general strike of 1926 revealed the seriousness of the class battles in Britain.A symbolic method of writing had already started early in the 20th century. It was in the twenties, along with work of Critical Realism produced by Shaw, Wells and Galsworthy, that there appeared writers who refused to acknowledge reality as such. They would not believe that the mind of man reflected reality- nature and society. They would not believe that social relations between people influenced not only the formation of character in individuals, but also historical events. They thought reality to be superficial,- it was only a world of appearances. These writers called the inner psychological process "the stream of consciousness" and based a new literary technique upon it.The most important author to use this new literary technique was James Joyce (1882-1941).He influenced many writers on both sides of the Atlantic. James Joyce, a native of Ireland, spent nearly all his life in voluntary exile. He could not live in his own country for it was enslaved by England. This fact may partly explain his pessimistic view on life, which is reflected in his work.The portrayal of the stream of consciousness as a literary technique is particularly evident in his major novel "Ulysses" (1922). The task he set before himself was to present a day in ordinary life as a miniature picture of the whole of human history; his characters being not only individuals but also universal representations of mankind in general. Therefore the text of "Ulysses" is a combination of different manners of writing and different styles. The actual characters of the book are often associated with people existing on the memories of the character, or with literary, historical and mythological figures. All this is intended by the author as a demonstration of the thesis that all manifestations of life are "programmed" in the subconscious mind.Among the writers of short stories who used the realistic method were Katherine Mansfield and Somerset Maugham. Though the works of these writers differ very much in their artistic approach, their authors had one feature in common: to them the stability of the existing social and political order seemed unquestionable.

From 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians

The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun.
Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century (upon Ibsen in drama and Balzac, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, and Dickens in fiction) and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance (performed 1905, published 1909) and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life.Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-suffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations of lower- and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes.These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never matched in his other fiction; in Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910), Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be advanced by their writing.Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms—the ballad, the narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the essay—that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions. The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There were many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century.The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring.
South African War: Boer troops
South African War: Boer troops
Boer troops lining up in battle against the British during the South African War (1899–1902).No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in The Princess Casamassima (1886), had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change. In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897), members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late fiction, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment.James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His fiction still presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic will.Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900), he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his fiction but also its very structure. His writing itself is marked by gaps in the narrative, by narrators who do not fully grasp the significance of the events they are retelling, and by characters who are unable to make themselves understood. James and Conrad used many of the conventions of 19th-century realism but transformed them to express what are considered to be peculiarly 20th-century preoccupations and anxieties.The Modernist revolution
Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and EliotFrom 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American.The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian movement (1912–22; see Georgian poetry) and more authentically by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell.Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made theimage their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms.Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of Vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent. His experimental play Enemy of the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel Tarr (1918) can still surprise with their violent exuberance.World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the bearers of authentic meaningsIn his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H. Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition, which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human intensity and passion.Modernist writer T.S. Eliot reading the first three stanzas of his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 1915.Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State UniversityOn the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the First World War, ensured that Lawrence and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period.During the 1920s Lawrence (who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of charismatic, masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion” and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some, the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit the reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for others, they ame from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political status of Pound’s ambitious but immensely difficult Imagist epic The Cantos (1917–70) and Lewis’s powerful sequence of politico-theological novels The Human Age (The Childermass, 1928; Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both 1955) are sharply divided.
Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid.Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot were the principal male figures of Anglo-American Modernism, but important contributions also were made by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce. By virtue of nationality, residence, and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped in Celtic mythology, they had less immediate impact upon the British literary intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot, although by the mid-1920s their influence had become direct and substantial. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s work as a novelist are the most important Modernist achievements of the period.
In his early verse and drama, Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland in language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish nationalism, he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not only by a more concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist movement, for Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family and country house of his friend and patron, Lady Gregory.The grandeur of his mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory. At its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.
Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe, expressed in his fiction his sense of the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank and imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New York postal authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition in 1923.) Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including the stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and the fantasies of various men and women in Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904. Yet his purpose was not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic range of European literature to stress the rich universality of life buried beneath the provincialism of pre-independence Dublin, in 1904 a city still within the British Empire. In his even more experimental Finnegans Wake (1939), extracts of which had already appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce’s commitment to cultural universality became absolute. By means of a strange, polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words, he not only explored the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages and myths of many other cultures.The example of Joyce’s experimentalism was followed by the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones and by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve). Whereas Jones concerned himself, in his complex and allusive poetry and prose, with the Celtic, Saxon, Roman, and Christian roots of Great Britain, MacDiarmid sought not only to recover what he considered to be an authentically Scottish culture but also to establish, as in his In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), the truly cosmopolitan nature of Celtic consciousness and achievement. MacDiarmid’s masterpiece in the vernacular, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), helped to inspire the Scottish renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s.

2. Joanne Rowling was born 31 July 1965), also known by her pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author and philanthropist. She wrote a seven-volume children's fantasy series, Harry Potter, published from 1997 to 2007. The series has been enormously successful: it has sold over 500 million copies, been translated into at least 70 languages, and spawned a global media franchise including films and video games. The Casual Vacancy (2012) was her first novel for adults. She writes Cormoran Strike, an ongoing crime fiction series, as Robert Galbraith.Born in Yate, Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter in 1987 and began working temp jobs as a bilingual secretary. In 1990, the idea for the characters of Harry Potter came to her while she waited on a delayed train. The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis, which deeply affected Rowling and her writing; the birth of her first child; and divorce from her first husband. She wrote the first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997), while experiencing relative poverty as a single parent. Forbes named her the world's highest-paid author in 2008, 2017 and 2019.Rowling concluded the Harry Potter series with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007). The novels follow a boy named Harry Potter as he attends Hogwarts, a school for wizards, and battles Lord Voldemort. Death and the divide between good and evil are the central themes of the series. Its influences include the Bildungsroman (coming-of-age story), school stories, fairy tales, and Christian allegory. The series revived fantasy as a genre in the children's market, spawned a host of imitators, and inspired an active fandom. Critical reception has been more mixed. Many reviewers see Rowling's writing as conventional; some regard her portrayal of gender and social division as regressive. There were also religious debates over Harry Potter.Rowling has won many accolades for her work. She was named to the Order of the British Empire and was appointed a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature and philanthropy. Harry Potter brought her wealth and recognition that she has used to advance philanthropic endeavours and political causes. She co-founded the charity Lumos and established the Volant Charitable Trust, named for her mother. Rowling's charitable giving centres on medical causes and supporting at-risk women and children. In politics, she has donated to Britain's Labour Party and opposed Scottish independence and Brexit. Since late 2019, she has publicly expressed her opinions on transgender people and related civil rights. These have been criticised as transphobic by LGBT rights organisations and some feminists, but have received support from other feminists and individuals.Although she writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling, before her remarriage her name was Joanne Rowling,or Jo.At birth, she had no middle name.Staff at Bloomsbury Publishing asked that she use two initials rather than her full name, anticipating that young boys – their target audience – would not want to read a book written by a woman.She chose K (for Kathleen) as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother, and because of the ease of pronunciation of two consecutive letters.Following her 2001 remarriage,] she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business.
Joanne Rowling was born on 31 July 1965 at Cottage Hospital in Yate.Her parents Anne (née Volant) and Peter "Pete" James Rowling had met the previous year on a train, sharing a trip from King's Cross Station, London, to their naval postings at Arbroath, Scotland. Anne was in the WREN and Pete was with the British Royal Navy. They came from middle-class backgrounds;Pete was the son of a machine-tool setter who later opened a grocery shop. They left the navy life and sought a country home to raise the baby they were expecting,and married on 14 March 1965 when both were 19. The Rowlings settled in Yate, where Pete started work as an assembly-line production worker at the Bristol Siddeley factory.Pete's company became part of Rolls-Royce, and he worked his way into management as a chartered engineer. Anne later worked as a science technician. Neither Anne nor Pete attended university.Joanne has a sister, Dianne, two years younger than her.When Joanne was four, the family moved to Winterbourne, Gloucestershire.She began at St Michael's Church of England Primary School in Winterbourne when she was five.The Rowlings lived near a family called Potter – a name Joanne always liked. Anne loved to read and their homes were filled with books.Pete read The Wind in the Willows to his daughters,while Anne introduced them to the animals in Richard Scarry's books. Joanne's first attempt at writing, a story called "Rabbit" composed when she was six, was inspired by Scarry's creatures.
When Rowling was about nine, the family purchased the historic Church Cottage in Tutshill.In 1974, Rowling began attending the nearby Church of England School.Biographer Sean Smith describes her teacher Sylvia Morgan as a "battleaxe" who "struck fear into the hearts of the children";she seated Rowling in "dunces' row" after she performed poorly on an arithmetic testIn 1975, Rowling joined a Brownies pack. Its special events and parties, and the pack groups (Fairies, Pixies, Sprites, Elves, Gnomes and Imps) provided a magical world away from the stern Morgan.When she was eleven or twelve, she wrote a short story, "The Seven Cursed Diamonds". She later described herself during this period as "the epitome of a bookish child – short and squat, thick National Health glasses, living in a world of complete daydreams".

Secondary school and university

Rowling's secondary school was Wyedean School and College, a state school she began attending at age eleven and where she was bullied.Rowling was inspired by her favourite teacher, Lucy Shepherd, who taught the importance of structure and precision in writing. Smith writes that Rowling "craved to play heavy electric guitar",and describes her as "intelligent yet shy".According to her teacher Dale Neuschwander, she impressed her teachers with her imagination.When she was a young teenager, Rowling's great-aunt gave her Hons and Rebels, the autobiography of the civil rights activist Jessica Mitford. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and she read all her books.Anne had a strong influence on her daughter.Early in Rowling's life, the support of her mother and sister instilled confidence and enthusiasm for storytelling.Anne was a creative and accomplished cook,who helped lead her daughters' Brownie activities,and took a job in the chemistry department at Wyedean while her daughters were there. The three walked to and from school, sharing stories about their day, more like sisters than mother and daughters. John Nettleship, the head of science at Wyedean, described Anne as "absolutely brilliant, a sparkling character ... very imaginative"Anne Rowling was diagnosed with a "virulent strain" of multiple sclerosis when she was] or and Jo was and had to give up her job. Rowling's home life was complicated by her mother's illness and a strained relationship with her father.Rowling later said "home was a difficult place to be",and that her teenage years were unhappy In 2020, she wrote that her father would have preferred a son and described herself as having severe obsessive–compulsive disorder in her teens .She began to smoke, took an interest in alternative rock,and adopted Siouxsie Sioux's back-combed hair and black eyeliner. Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth, owned a turquoise Ford Anglia that provided an escape from her difficult home life and the means for Harris and Rowling to broaden their activities.
Living in a small town with pressures at home, Rowling became more interested in her school work.Steve Eddy, her first secondary school English teacher, remembers her as "not exceptional" but "one of a group of girls who were bright, and quite good at English". Rowling took A-levels in English, French and German, achieving two As and a B and was named head girl at Wyedean. She applied to Oxford University in 1982 but was rejected. Biographers attribute her rejection to privilege, as she had attended a state school rather than a private one.Rowling always wanted to be a writer,but chose to study French and the classics at the University of Exeter for practical reasons, influenced by her parents who thought job prospects would be better with evidence of bilingualism. She later stated that Exeter was not initially what she expected ("to be among lots of similar people – thinking radical thoughts") but that she enjoyed herself after she met more people like her. She was an average student at Exeter, described by biographers as prioritising her social life over academics, lacking ambition and enthusiasm.Rowling recalls doing little work at university, preferring to read Dickens and Tolkien. She earned a BA in French from Exeter,graduating in 1987 after a year of study in Paris.
Inspiration and mother's death
After university, Rowling moved to a flat in Clapham Junction with friends,and took a course to become a bilingual secretary.While she was working temp jobs in London, Amnesty International hired her to document human rights issues in French-speaking Africa.She began writing adult novels while working as a temp, although they were never published.In 1990, she planned to move with her boyfriend to Manchester,and frequently took long train trips to visit.In mid-1990, she was on a train delayed by four hours from Manchester to London,when the characters Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger came plainly into her mind.Having no pen or paper allowed her to fully explore the characters and their story in her imagination before she reached her flat and began to write.
Rowling moved to Manchester around November 1990.She described her time in Manchester, where she worked for the Chamber of Commerce and at Manchester University in temp jobs,as a "year of misery".Her mother died of multiple sclerosis on 30 December 1990.At the time, she was writing Harry Potter and had never told her mother about it.She had a difficult relationship with her father, and her mother's death heavily affected Rowling's writing. She later said that the Mirror of Erised is about her mother's death,and noted an "evident parallelism" between Harry confronting his own mortality and her life.The pain of the loss of her mother was compounded when some of the personal effects her mother had left her were stolen.With the end of the relationship with her boyfriend, and "being made redundant from an office job in Manchester", Rowling described herself as being in a state of "fight or flight".An advertisement in The Guardian led her to move to Porto, Portugal, in November 1991 to teach night classes in English as a foreign language,writing during the day.Marriage, divorce, and single parenthood Five months after arriving in Porto, Rowling met the Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in a bar and found that they shared an interest in Jane Austen. By mid-1992, they were planning a trip to London to introduce Arantes to Rowling's family, when she had a miscarriage.The relationship was troubled, yet they married on 16 October 1992.Their daughter Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford[i]) was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal.By this time, Rowling had finished the first three chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone – almost as they were eventually published – and had drafted the rest of the novel.Rowling experienced domestic abuse during her marriage. Arantes said in June 2020 that he had slapped her and did not regret it.Rowling described the marriage as "short and catastrophic". Rowling and Arantes separated on 17 November 1993 after Arantes threw her out of the house; she returned with the police to retrieve Jessica and went into hiding for two weeks before she left Portugal.In late 1993, with a draft of Harry Potter in her suitcase,Rowling moved with her daughter to Edinburgh, Scotland,planning to stay with her sister through Christmas.
Her biographer Sean Smith raises the question of why Rowling chose to stay with her sister rather than her father.Rowling has spoken of an estrangement from her father, stating in an interview with Oprah Winfrey that "It wasn't a good relationship from my point of view for a very long time but I had a need to please and I kept that going for a long time and then there ... just came a point at which I had to pull up and say I can't do this anymore." Pete had married his secretary within two years of Anne's death,and The Scotsman reported in 2003 that "[t]he speed of his decision to move in with his secretary ... distressed both sisters and a fault-line now separated them and their father." Rowling said in 2012 that they had not spoken in the last nine years.
Rowling sought government assistance and got £69 (US$103.50) per week from Social Security; not wanting to burden her recently married sister, she moved to a flat that she characterised as mouse-ridden.She later described her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless". Seven years after graduating from university, she saw herself as a failure.Tison Pugh writes that the "grinding effects of poverty, coupled with her concern for providing for her daughter as a single parent, caused great hardship".Her marriage had failed and she was jobless with a dependent child, but she later described this as "liberating" her to focus on writing.She has said that "Jessica kept me going".Her old school friend, Sean Harris, loaned her £600 ($900), which allowed her to move to a flat in Leith,where she finished Philosopher's Stone.
Arantes arrived in Scotland in March 1994 seeking both Rowling and Jessica.on 15 March 1994, Rowling sought an action of interdict (order of restraint); the interdict was granted and Arantes returned to Portugal.Early in the year, Rowling began to experience a deep depression and sought medical help when she contemplated suicide.With nine months of therapy, things gradually improved.She filed for divorce on 10 August 1994 and the divorce was finalised on 26 June 1995.
Rowling wanted to finish the book before enrolling in a teacher training course, fearing she might not be able to finish once she started the course. She often wrote in cafés,including Nicolson's, owned in partnership by her brother-in-law.Secretarial work brought in £15 ($22.50) per week, but she would lose government benefits if she earned more.In the summer of 1995, a friend gave her money that allowed her to go off benefits and enrol full-time in college.Still needing money and expecting to make a living by teaching, Rowling began a teacher training course in August 1995 at Moray House School of Education after completing her first novel.She earned her teaching certificate in July 1996. Rowling later said that writing the first Harry Potter book had saved her life and that her concerns about "love, loss, separation, death ... are reflected in the first book".

3 .Publishing Harry Potter

Rowling completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in June 1995.The initial draft included an illustration of Harry by a fireplace, showing a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead .Following an enthusiastic report from an early reader, Christopher Little Literary Agency agreed to represent Rowling. Her manuscript was submitted to twelve publishers, all of which rejected it.Barry Cunningham, who ran the children's literature department at Bloomsbury Publishing, eventually bought it.Nigel Newton, who headed Bloomsbury at the time, decided to go ahead with the manuscript after his eight-year-old daughter finished one chapter and wanted to keep reading. Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, one of Rowling's favourite memories was of Cunningham telling her, "You'll never make any money out of children's books, Jo."Rowling was awarded a writer's grant by the Scottish Arts Council to support her childcare costs and finances before Philosopher's Stone's publication, and to aid in writing the sequel, Chamber of Secrets. On 26 June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher's Stone with an initial print run of 500 copies. Before Chamber of Secrets was published, Rowling had received only £2,800 ($4,200) in royalties.
Philosopher's Stone introduces Harry Potter. Harry is a wizard who lives with his non-magical relatives until his eleventh birthday, when he is invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.Rowling wrote six sequels, which follow Harry's adventures at Hogwarts with friends Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley and his attempts to defeat Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents when he was a child.In Philosopher's Stone, Harry foils Voldemort's plan to acquire an elixir of life; in Deathly Hallows, the final book, he kills Voldemort.Rowling received the news that the US rights were being auctioned at the Bologna Children's Book Fair.To her surprise and delight, Scholastic Corporation bought the rights for $105,000.She bought an apartment in Edinburgh with the money from the sale.Arthur A. Levine, head of the imprint at Scholastic, pushed for a name change. He wanted Harry Potter and the School of Magic; as a compromise Rowling suggested Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.Sorcerer's Stone was released in the United States in September 1998. It was not widely reviewed, but the reviews it received were generally positive. Sorcerer's Stone became a New York Times bestseller by December.
The next three books in the series were released in quick succession between 1998 and 2000: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000), each selling millions of copies.When Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was delayed and had not appeared by 2002, rumours circulated that Rowling was suffering writer's block. It was published in June 2003, selling millions of copies on the first day.Two years later, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was released in July, again selling millions of copies on the first day.The series ended with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, published in July 2007.In 1999, Warner Bros. purchased film rights to the first two Harry Potter novels for a reported $1 million. Rowling accepted the offer with the provision that the studio only produce Harry Potter films based on books she authored,while retaining the right to final script approval,and some control over merchandising. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, an adaptation of the first Harry Potter book, was released in November 2001. Steve Kloves wrote the screenplays for all but the fifth film,with Rowling's assistance, ensuring that his scripts kept to the plots of the novels. The film series concluded with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was adapted in two parts; part one was released on 19 November 2010, and part two followed on 15 July 2011.Warner Bros. announced an expanded relationship with Rowling in 2013, including a planned series of films about her character Newt Scamander, fictitious author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.The first film of five, a prequel to the Harry Potter series, set roughly 70 years earlier, was released in November 2016.Rowling wrote the screenplay, which was released as a book. Crimes of Grindelwald was released in November 2018.Secrets of Dumbledore was released in April 2022.
4 Religion, wealth and remarriage