Is Rowling's Best Work Behind Her Now?

The Twenty-Five Year Rule of Great Authors

Is Rowling past her prime? With the completion of The Running Grave, in several ways the ‘end’ of the Cormoran Strike series, and at just over twenty-five years since the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is her best work already on our shelves? Of course only time will tell, but the pattern of history is that the Greats of English literature have a twenty-five year publication window, which, if the pattern holds for Rowling has significant meaning for those interpreting her work.

There is an adage among runners that, at most, an athlete has ten years competing at a high level during which his or her times can improve, a decade when personal bests can be achieved, before age and burn-out prevent improvement. There are some exceptions, obviously, to this handy metric, especially in light of runners ‘moving up’ from shorter to longer distances and improved training techniques, but not as many as you’d think.

Something similar seems to be in play with the literary Greats. Twenty-five years seems to be their outer limit for greatness. The best writers have done their best work, often all of their work, in their first twenty-five years writing in the language and name for which they became known.

When I was growing up, three writers were considered the best of the 20th century, men with whose work every intelligent person was assumed to be familiar: James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. I remember once asking an English teacher at Phillips Exeter why the faculty in his department never awarded a student paper an ‘A;’ ‘A-’ and ‘B+’ were “highest honors’ (and rarely awarded, believe me). “The ‘A’,” he told me, “is reserved for Hemingway.”

I was required to read in high school, as I think most members of my generation were, the shortest and most accessible books by this Triumvirate: Dubliners by Joyce, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, and The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway. Throw in a tragedy or two by Shakespeare — Romeo and Juliet and one of the Hard Core Four — and Dickens’ shortest, Tale of Two Cities, and you could graduate without blushing about your relative illiteracy.

Looking at the writing career of Joyce, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway reveals that they all comply with the Twenty-Five Year Rule.

Exactly twenty-five years separate Dubliners and Ulysses (1914-1939), for example. Fitzgerald’s career was necessarily short as he died young, though he was already showing signs of having passed his peak well before his premature death; his publication years stretched from 1920 to 1941. Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring came out in 1926 and Old Man and the Sea in 1952, a twenty-six year run.

That’s an admittedly small sample size, but you get the idea. Let’s take a look at J. K. Rowling’s favorite authors, then, for a larger pool of writers and one more relevant to the subject of this post.

Rowling's seven greatest influences, by her own admission and critical consensus are Jane Austen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Colette, her favorite three, and Shakespeare, Dickens, Lewis, and Tolkien (see the semi-complete list of Rowling’s professed preferences among writers for more: ‘Rowling’s Admitted Literary Influences’).

• William Shakespeare: 1589-1614 (25)

From the earliest dating of Two Gentlemen of Verona to the latest dating of the collaborative plays, the Bard wrote for twenty-five years.

• Jane Austen: 1811-1817 (6)

Rowling’s favorite writer and the author of her favorite book, Emma, died young, only six years after the publication of her first novel.

• Charles Dickens: 1836-1864 (28)

Dickens wrote all of his short stories and novels with the exception of Our Mutual Friend in the twenty-five years after the publication of The Pickwick Papers in 1836.

• Colette: 1919-1944 (25)

Colette is one of the three writers that Rowling has said more than once are her favorites, if she has not been asked this question for some time, and, at first glance, it seems she wrote for much longer than twenty-five years. Her first Claudine novel was published in 1900 and Gigi in 1944. The first twenty years of her publication history, however, were collaborative efforts in what she described as something of a writing apprenticeship to her first husband Wally. Dating her writing career from the appearance of Mitsou in 1919, her years of writing as Colette stretch twenty-five years.

• Vladimir Nabokov: 1941-1972 (31)

Nabokov, the “writer I really love” according to Rowling, is similarly complicated. He wrote his first novels as ‘Sirin’ in Russian for the European émigré community of those exiled by the Soviet revolution and holocaust (1926-1939). His writing in English under his own name, however, begins only in 1941 and stretches to 1972, a period of just over thirty years.

• C. S. Lewis: 1933-1956 (23)

Lewis’ first book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, perhaps the least well known of his work, was published in 1933, and Till We Have Faces, his retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth and personal favorite of his own writing, was published 1956. As I noted in my discussion of the Cormoran Strike series as a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, it would hard to overstate the influence of Lewis on Rowling. How bizarre if the Strike novels prove to be Rowling’s finale as well.

• J. R. R. Tolkien: 1937-1962 (25)

Tolkien’s publication history begins with The Hobbit in 1937 and closes with The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book in 1962. Really, though, Tolkien was done in 1955 when The Return of the King was published.

If we throw out the highest and lowest of this Spectacular Seven, Austen and Nabokov respectively, the average publication history for Rowling’s favorites is 5/126 or almost exactly twenty-five years. If we include all the writers and include all of Colette’s works, we get 7/182 or exactly 26 years. That’s about as good an approximation as we’re going to get with this kind of metric.

There are seven important exceptions to the twenty-five year rule, however, all of which can be found on the list of ‘Rowling’s Admitted Literary Influences,’ six of whom are the consensus picks for greatest women writers of detective fiction, arguably Rowling’s core genre. In chronological order of first publications to last:

• P. G. Wodehouse: 1902-1974 (52)

• Agatha Christie: 1921-1973 (52) 

• Dorothy Sayers: 1923-1941 (19)

• Margery Allingham: 1929-1965 (36) 

• Ngaio Marsh: 1934-1982 (48)

• P. D. James: 1962-2011 (49)

• Ruth Rendell: 1964-2015 (51)

Add all those up and divide by seven (7/307) and you get an average writing career of just under forty-four years, almost two decades beyond the rule. I suppose you could try to find a twenty-five year ‘peak’ inside these lifetimes of excellent writing, but some of Christie’s best work — her favorite, Endless Night, for example — was written in her dotage (1967) and James’ Death Comes to Pemberley was near to her last entry, one of her most popular, and certainly has to be included among her best.

One might say that none of these writers qualify as ‘Greats’ outside their niche genres and I suppose among academics that assertion-posing-as-an-argument might be the default opinion, even the consensus. I strongly suspect that history will have a different verdict, one less obviously misogynist, less prejudiced in favor of the ‘literary novel,’ and more appreciative, in the case of Wodehouse, of comic genius.

So, so what? Outside of these notable exceptions, what if there is a twenty-five year rule for greatness among the Greats, for writers of longer novels at least?

If there is, then we have to consider the possibility that, with the publication of Running Grave, Rowling’s work is in essence finished; the rest is just jumping the shark.

Here is my Assertion, one I’ll be exploring in future posts:

J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith: 1997-2023 (26) -- The publication of Running Grave represents the completion of the Strike series as originally conceived; Strike7 structurally and thematically latches the series ring. With it, Rowling's essential oeuvre at twenty-six years can be considered closed. Her best work is done and can begin to be criticized as a complete canon or as the high point of her work (i.e., there will be no more equivalents to the Potter or Strike series).

To be continued!