J. K. Rowling: The World's Most Important Writer, Feminist, and Philanthropist

Why I Have Read and Written about the Work of Joanne Murray for Twenty-Five Years and Why I Don't Think I Have Been Wasting My Time

Ron Weasley rebuked Hermione Granger once with the comment, “Always the tone of surprise.” He was referring to her unconscious estimation of him as something of a bumbling idiot who rarely got things right. Not pretty.

Two weeks ago after a church service in northeastern Arkansas, a newly illumined (baptized) woman in her thirties I had met for the first time at Pascha this year in South Carolina greeted me with a hug and a smile. “John,” she said, “the Harry Potter guy.” It was said affectionately enough, a note that she remembered me -- but also as if my niche celebrity as a serious reader of J. K. Rowling was something of a joke she got. There was the inevitable hint that my decades of work devoted to Rowling Studies was borderline pathetic, a life and mind spent on childish things, a pat on the head.

I might have said to Gabriella, “Always the tone of disdain…, ” but that would have been silly. This hint wasn’t peculiar to her, an unusually thoughtful woman who had just met me, as it had been to fictional Hermione and Ron, who were close friends.

Gabriela’s greeting, too, wasn’t anything new or unusual or unkind, really. It’s been the rule to which exceptions are almost always from other serious readers of J. K. Rowling; academics, reporters, friends, family, and fellow Team Members at the grocery store where I work much more often than not treat my signature work as if it were a strange kind of fetish, something I should be slightly embarrassed about, a hobby about something no more interesting or important than building models or collecting beer cans, one that had taken over my life and distracted me from meaningful uses of my intelligence and time.

They show a certain deference, as you’d expect, to my advanced degrees, publications, and Walter Mitty reality but there’s usually that curious note bordering on disdain for the subject of my expertise. One of my PhD advisers, for example, a global authority on the life and work of Franz Kafka, noted at our first meeting it was a stretch for him to be supervising my thesis because his parents hadn’t let him read Enid Blyton as a child and he certainly couldn’t be bothered to read Harry Potter, today’s equivalent of the Magic Treehouse books.

I doubt very much this is specific to me. I remember James Thomas, a first tier Potter Pundit and now a retired Pepperdine professor, sharing with me the confusion of his English department peers in Malibu about his interest in Rowling as an author. James, after all, had published on Poe and Faulkner. Y’know, real authors writing at real depth and with real artistry.

As I begin a series of articles to commemorate and, in an odd way, celebrate this summer the 60th birthday of the author known to the world as ‘J. K. Rowling’ and ‘Robert Galbraith,’ both pseudonyms and one an international brand worth billions of pounds sterling, I want to push back against this prejudice in the popular mind as well as in the academy.

What follows, of course, my one-off apologia pro vita mea, will have no effect on what people think and that’s more than okay (frankly, the wonderful people I have met and perks I have enjoyed as the “Dean of Harry Potter scholars” make the dismissive ribbing and condescension I get seem like a very small price to pay). I want to set the table here, though, for ideas and possibilities I will be writing about before 31 July, posts I have reason to believe will be a re-setting of the premises of Rowling Studies, the field I have played a larger part in establishing than perhaps any other critic.

Why, after all, should anyone care about the artistry and meaning of Rowling’s work or about her life? So what?

My thesis today is that everyone has reason to care because Joanne Rowling Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and hereafter ‘Rowling,’ is not only the most important writer of our time but also the most important philanthropist and feminist as well. For the purposes of this review, I define “most important” as “most famous, most influential, and most challenging” and argue that there is plenty to write and think about those aspects of her published work, charities, and core beliefs which are edifying points of reflections for thoughtful people today with respect both to their own thinking as well as what it means to be human.

To anticipate inevitable questions:

• No, I have never met Rowling or corresponded with her.

• No, I do not agree with many of her beliefs (sadly, the ones I do agree on, at least with respect to her conclusions if not with how she arrived at them, have meant my cancellation for the most part in ‘AcaFandom’ and publishing).

• And, no, I’m not saying that Rowling Studies is a field of inquiry equivalent to psychology, biology, theology, history, literature and mythology, or even Shakespeare Studies and Coleridge contemplations.

I am saying, however, that this nook of specialization is one which requires knowledge of all those fields and which rewards investment of time and talent generously.

My methodology here will be simple. I will share reasons for thinking (1) Rowling is very famous and influential as writer, philanthropist, and feminist, (2) that there is no one else more famous and influential making her by default the “most,” and (3) that the defining aspects and mysteries of her thoughts and deeds are simultaneously challenging and worthy of investigation and discussion.

(1) Is Rowling the Most Important Writer of Our Time?

Let’s pick the low-hanging fruit.

(a) Rowling the Writer is Very Famous and Influential

Beginning in 1997, Rowling has published seven Harry Potter novels, seven Cormoran Strike mysteries, three Fantastic Beasts screenplays, one play script (written by John Thorne), three stand-alone stories (Casual Vacancy, The Ickabog, and The Christmas Pig), and four ancillary Potter texts (two Hogwarts textbooks, one fairy tale collection, and the digital From the Wizarding Archive). All have been international best sellers and translated into languages from Arabic to Welsh. Her Potter series of books continue to be Amazon best sellers, as in Top Twenty, close to thirty years after their first appearance.

Potter mania, in fact, largely recreated the publishing of fiction and the industry’s idea of what was possible with respect to children’s, YA, and serial novels. I think it fair to say, as in “indisputable” if still unquantifiable and consequently indemonstrable, that the work of authors such as Lev Grossman, Stephenie Meyer, Veronica Roth, and Suzanne Collins would not have been written or published except for the influence of Rowling on these authors and the barriers in conception and publishing her genre bending genius destroyed forever.

(b) There is No Living or Contemporary Writer who is More Famous and Influential

Rowling is not unique in her success among writers today. Nora Roberts, Danielle Steele, Roth, Meyer, Collins, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Robert Patterson, Dan Brown, and Dean Koontz’s book have all sold in the multi-millions and each enjoys international fandoms.

But none approach Rowling’s fame, click-bait status, or influence with the current generation of writers, critics, and academics, the great majority of whom I’d bet grew up reading (and re-reading) her work.

And reach, as in social media power? Stephen King has the largest twixter platform of all writers not J. K. Rowling with 6.8 million followers. Rowling has more than twice as many.

I admit that I live in the Bubble-World of Rowling Studies. I do not think it a stretch, however, despite that obvious pre-occupation and consequent bias to think other people must think as I do, to believe that the man in the street of New York or New Delhi, when asked to name a living writer would respond (with a shrug), “J. K. Rowling.”

(C) Rowling’s Written Work is Challenging and Worthy of Investigation and Discussion

Popularity, I know, is no sure measure that a written work is worth “serious adult attention,” as William Safire put it, though I think it a better one than many allow. Winning millions of readers is not a sign that an author does not write well or at any depth of meaning, as A. S. Byatt suggested; he or she must be doing something right, as Lev Grossman dared to say about Meyer’s Twilight series.

That being said, I get it. Dan Brown’s novels are written on a “blockbuster book” formula that a friend shared with him when he was a struggling joke-book writer (I kid you not). Brown’s Robert Langdon thrillers are more than just best-sellers; a new arrival is a publishing event that makes other writers re-schedule their publication dates to avoid having their latest work being lost in his wake. I think Rowling’s publishers moved the publication of Hallmarked Man from 9 September to 2 September to avoid conflict with Brown’s 9 September release of The Secret of Secrets.

Having read several of Brown’s books with an open mind, though, I don’t think they’re anything more than distracting entertainments. If they are the subject of study, their chief value will be as markers to future historians of prevalent tastes and to certain literary critics of both successful formula writing and the importance of supernatural elements in popular fiction (search ‘Eliade Thesis’ or just read this).

Rowling’s work, however, in addition to being extraordinarily popular is also writing of remarkable artistry and depth; I’d argue that it is as popular as it is because of that craft and profundity. It is certainly why I have spent a quarter century reading and writing about her novels. Her revival of literary alchemy, signature chiastic writing, various soul allegories, and use of traditional symbolism is simultaneously Nabokovian and wonderfully engaging and accessible to readers of every skill level and interest. I’m confident her twenty plus novels and screenplays will be read and studied until the Parousia.

Human beings are the story-telling animals because Man is a logos or meaning created deiform; story, the activation of the Primary Imagination transpersonal logos within us all, is the primary and best delivery system of meaning (whence Lewis’ definition of imagination as the “organ of meaning”). We study story, consequently, because we wish to draw out its meaning and to understand ourselves in light of what it means to be human. We study those story-tellers and their work which have most profoundly and universally touched the human center, the logos eye of the heart, because the traditional tools they use reflect in their symbolism or imaginative iconography, their structure, and their representation of our trinitarian structure qua imago Dei the metaphysical ground or substance of creation.

Rowling is one of those writers.

And here’s the thing — there’s a lot we still do not know or understand about Rowling’s work. She revealed in 2019 and repeated in 2024 that her work is inspired by her unconscious mind’s struggle with unresolved issues as well as her core beliefs, spring-ing up from what she calls her ‘Lake;’ what we do not know about any of her work (besides Christmas Pig?) is what the issues are that inspired them, knowledge that will surely color and re-direct our understanding of Harry Potter, the Strike mysteries, and Casual Vacancy. Rowling Studies, as well as we may understand her ‘Shed’ artistry and technical skill, is really in its infancy.

I called the part of this argument about Rowling’s importance as a writer “low hanging fruit” because, while some may dispute she is the most famous and influential author or that her work is significantly challenging, she is most well known as a novelist cum screen writer.

As a feminist and philanthropist? Not so much. Let’s look at those aspects of her life and work to see if she can fairly be said to be the most important feminist and philanthropist of our times.

(2) Is Rowling the Most Important Feminist of Our Time?

I am obliged to note that I am not a student of feminism, historical or contemporary, and that my views as a Perennialist and Orthodox Christian prejudice my perspective on almost all modern and post-modern -isms (to include ‘Perennialism’ when understood as any kind of movement or faux-faith). I am not a person, consequently, whose thoughts about either movement or academic feminism you should take seriously; look to scholars in the field as well as bona fide feminists for that.

What follows is best taken, then, as nothing more than a catalyst or accelerant to a public conversation about Rowling’s feminism, the self-defining beliefs about which she has been the most forthcoming (we know next to nothing, for example, about her religious beliefs relative to her thinking about women and their rights). This ‘push’ is only necessary because, beyond pigeon-holing Rowling as a Gender Critical and biology based feminist, ‘TERF’ to the trolls, very little ink has been spilled about her beliefs per se, their origin, or their importance.

I will try to make the case that she is the most important feminist of our time in order to spur rebuttals (or affirmations!) from those better qualified to judge. I look forward to learning a lot about my blind-spots, if I’m not anticipating any thanks for my efforts.

(a) Rowling the Feminist is Very Famous and Influential

Rowling has a Twixter following of 14.3 million readers. Very few of her tweets, frankly, today are about her novels if she does post clues to what she’s working on in her homepage headers and note when new books are in the queue. What she posts about almost every day, frequently several times a day, are women’s issues.

Since 2019 she has been the most public face and the private bankroller of biology based feminist resistance to gender theorist extremists; her Twixter page and website have been her primary venues to advance the cause of securing women’s safe spaces from trans-identifying men and to protect women and children from “transitioning” (chemical castration and surgical mutilation) and the over-reach of Trans Rights Activists (e.g., men competing in women’s sports).

And what a force she has been in this cause! Fighting the rip-tides of Pharmaceutical-captured government, media, and science’s support of trans-mania, Rowling spear-headed resistance to the erosion of women’s rights and protections for children in the name of biology-based or Gender Critical feminism.

She is sui generis in this effort, being neither an academic nor movement feminist but an independent agent using her private fortune to fund the necessary legal battles and her social media platform and web site as her bully pulpit. She speaks as an outsider and a common-sense populist; Donald Trump, a politician with whom she has openly warred and for whom she expresses only disdain, is the closest equivalent to Rowling in his successful use of outside-the-Narrative tweets to move the needle of public opinion.

Though not a theorist of feminism but a generous funding source and both an invaluable and perhaps irreplaceable advocate for women’s rights, Rowling’s efforts in a very public battle contra mundum have made her almost as famous for her championing this cause as she is as a writer. Her novels since 2020 have been reviewed in the popular press and by too many academics first with an eye to how they reflect her supposedly “transphobic” beliefs rather than as literature or popular fiction.

I’m going to leave the point about whether Rowling is very famous and influential at that and move on to whether she is the most famous and influential feminist.

(b) There is No Living or Contemporary Feminist who is More Famous and Influential

I noted above that Rowling has twice as many Twixter followers as any other living writer. In my reading of the three top Google-search lists of ‘most famous feminists’ (see here, here, and here for those), Meghan Markle, AOC, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey, Madonna, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton were the only ones I found with significant social media followings.

Again, I am obliged to note my ignorance and de facto indifference to feminism per se. As someone who follows the news sufficiently to be able to recognize pictures of these women and the reasons for their celebrity, however, I don’t think any of them have been as influential as Rowling has been in the cause of women’s rights. Several of them are more famous, I think, and two or three — Beyonce, Madonna, and Oprah? — may have more money in addition to as great name recognition. But not as feminists, right?

If pressed to name three living ‘famous and influential feminists,’ I would have said Gloria Steinem, Bell Hooks, and Susan Faludi. (Camille Paglia, too, but her feminism like Rowling’s is also considered anathema by many feminists; we’ll come back to her in another post.) Drawing on lists of “key feminist theorists” of the present and recent past, I’d include Germaine Greer, Judith Butler, Audrey Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Kate Millett, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (It being necessary to point out the obvious, Rowling’s name appears on exactly none of the online lists I found that count out celebrity, movement, and academic feminists with hagiographic profile blurbs; I only found one online discussion of the admitted sources of her feminist beliefs, ‘The Feminist Touchstones of J. K. Rowling.’)

None of these “key feminist theorists” are as famous or as influential as J. K. Rowling with the possible exception of Steinem whose days as a leader and leading thinker of the movement I think are long passed. If the television gameshow ‘Family Feud’ were to survey their audiences for the ten most frequent answers to the challenge ‘Name a Famous Feminist,’ back to my ‘man-in-the-street’ argument, I’m confident that Rowling and the women celebrities would be mentioned, not the academic theorists or movement leaders, and of these Rowling is I think obviously the most influential. Quid erat demonstrandum.

Point for reflection: the most challenging and influential feminist, beyond having the greatest name-recognition, is one few think of as a feminist.

(C) Rowling’s Feminism is Challenging and Worthy of Investigation and Discussion

Does anyone dispute this? Isn’t it fascinating that so little has been written about the sources of Rowling’s feminist core beliefs beyond her experience, how those beliefs align or conflict with contemporary feminist thought, and, for me the most interesting, how she created a counter-movement to a rampant public hysteria essentially out of publicly posted bon mots, short jabs, and satiric epigraphs?

Crickets.

I’m told by Nick Jeffery that on Twixter there seems to be a curious dichotomy in posts there about Rowling and her feminism. Gender Critical feminists discuss Rowling’s ideas as she shares them in her tweets but they never talk about the author’s novels; the fandoms of both Potter and Strike, as much as the neotenous MNet and Leaky crew allow She Who Must Not Be Named to be mentioned, discuss her work but not her feminism as such except to applaud or decry it. I’ve begged him to write that observation up, if only, as with this effort, to spur the conversation.

The ‘So What?’ of Rowling’s feminism, what makes her views important, as with her importance as a story-teller, is the degree to which understanding men and women per se is at the heart of what it means to be human. The only matter with which I join arms with feminists is that we agree on the importance of the subject; one of the defining problems with the modern and postmodern worlds in which we live is that our grasp of what man and woman are and their right relations is obviously off, which is to say, wrong.

I’m not speaking here in the jargon of rights, power, victimization, or politics, though the errors of our age play out in those spheres and beneath those parameter umbrellas. The problem from the Perennialist and traditional Christian view is on the level, again, of Man as imago Dei. God is best understood, in Palamite theological terms, as being simultaneously a transcendent Essence beyond human comprehension or understanding and His Energies, the creative interface of God and everything existent. All Creation — quantifiable things, immaterial ideas, history itself — reflects this polarity without duality that is in its Creator; St Paul says that atheists are without excuse for their denial of God because He can be seen in everything around them in how each reflects His “eternal power” or Energies and “Godhead,” the ineffable Essence (Romans 1:20: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse”).

I don’t need to remind you that we live in a godless or de facto God-denying civilization post-modernity, no matter the ubiquity of churches. The greatest proofs of this beyond the nearly absolute absence of wonder-working saints in a global population far exceeding any in human history is how alien the idea, beyond sentiment, that every human being in form and substance is an image of the Transcendent/Immanent God, a reality created each moment for the purpose of growing in the Creator’s likeness. Time and Space, Night and Day (Winter to Summer), and Man and Woman, not to mention body and soul, the human visible and invisible aspects, are the omnipresent reminders of this foundational reality of complementary antagonism — whence the symbolism of the Cross, the Star of David, the Tao, and the Swastika — but we live our lives as if these markers of God’s Essence and Energies were meaningless accidents.

The nightmare of “transgenderism” with respect to individual lives as well as our culture is how it simultaneously reflects and fosters this delusion and ignorance. Creation is a hierophany, as Eliade explains in The Sacred and the Profane, and “transgenderism” is a confession of blindness to that iconographic manifestation of the Sacred, an innate or willful blindness per St. Paul.

Rowling’s foundation for resisting this error as it plays out in women’s safe spaces in contrast is what she considers the unbreakable bedrock of Enlightenment empiricism and material science (whence “biology-based” feminism). We part company there. She arrives at the right conclusion on the specific issue, but, as with her advocacy of lesbianism and abortion, she is much more in the camp of those she resists than she seems to grasp. She writes her stories using traditional which is to say theocentric tools but her feminist beliefs are those of thoroughly modern Millie.

Regardless, this discussion of what it means to be a man or woman and how a human being is to live in light of that meaning is, as it was of Man as a story-telling animal, one of the two or three most important issues to get right if one wants to live a truly human life. Rowling’s feminism, what she gets right, where she errs, the Zeitgeist and the madness of crowds we are living in with respect to the elision of the sexes in the fog of ‘gender,’ make this discussion as challenging as it is important — again, Q. E. D. with respect to Rowling’s importance.

I’m going to move on from this beach head for the three philanthropy notes with this final Parthian shot.

Rowling’s work as a novelist is challenging and worthy of close study beyond her fame and influence because of the importance of story-telling to the human being; her importance and the importance of understanding her qua feminist likewise, I think, is, as noted, due to the centrality of the theological meaning of sex to our self-understanding. In contrast with her writing, in which her traditional tools largely keep her on track, her feminist views, wrong-headed as they seem to me in their point of origin however valid her conclusions, are exactly proportionate and due to her fame and influence as their firebrand public advocate.

(3) Is Rowling the Most Important Philanthropist of Our Time?

Of the three assertions of today’s post, this is perhaps the greatest reach. Rowling has been lauded for her philanthropy certainly; her reception into the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017, for example, was for “services to literature and philanthropy.” We’ve all heard about Lumos, many of us know about the Volant Foundation, and Rowling’s most recent effort, The J. K. Rowling Women’s Fund, “A legal fighting fund for women protecting their sex-based rights,” has been well covered in print and online. Philanthropy is a big part of Rowling’s life; as much as she says she doesn’t think about her legacy (“I’ll be dead,” which is code for “I don’t care”), she hopes to be remembered more for her charity than her stories.

But the most important philanthropist of our time? C’mon.

(a) Rowling the Philanthropist is Very Famous and Influential

Two weeks ago The Times of London profiled Rowling exclusively in her role as philanthropist: JK Rowling: ‘Nobody who hasn’t been poor can understand what it means’ The author, ranked 168 on The Sunday Times Rich List, opens up about her childhood, life on benefits and the pitfalls of philanthropy. As I mentioned in a recent weblog post, the timing of this piece suggests that Rowling, Inc’s marvelous marketing mavens are working a pre-birthday blitz to rehabilitate the author’s public image (the Rowling “cancellation” by TRAs and Potter fandom leaders failed but their calumny and slander has found a home in the minds of millions).

The Times piece makes for astonishing reading even for someone like myself who thought I had a decent grasp of how much Rowling donated to charities. From The Times article:

In the 21 years since Vasek’s story was published Rowling has donated £63 million to Lumos, either directly or via the Harry Potter franchise, helping more than 280,000 children not just in eastern Europe but also Haiti, Colombia and Ukraine. All this and much, much more. The Sunday Times calculates that Rowling has donated almost £200 million to three main causes: Lumos, the Volant Charitable Trust and the Anne Rowling Regenerative Neurology Clinic. This has happened out of sight. She rarely gives interviews and has never talked about the full scope of her philanthropy before.

That close to £200 million she has given to charities she initiated does not include those she gives to other “projects.” Again The Times:

Rowling has since donated more than £86 million in grants to projects in Scotland and around the world, focusing on social deprivation with particular focus on women and children, who, in her words, “are at risk in their lives, or find themselves in situations where there seems to be no way out”….

In 2020 Rowling donated more than £12 million in royalties from her children’s fairytale, The Ickabog, to Volant, ring-fencing the money to support vulnerable people impacted by Covid-19. And she donates all royalties — £8.5 million to date — from the first of her Cormoran Strike detective series, written under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, to ABF The Soldiers’ Charity (now called the Army Benevolent Fund).

Assuming that Rowling is a Pounds-Billionaire, a figure that is often bandied about though she is only #168 on The Times ‘Rich List, those numbers mean that Rowling has given away between 25% and 30% of her earnings to charity. No, she’s not missing any meals, I’m sure, and that yacht isn’t great for its philanthropic optics, but I doubt many of the 167 people in Great Britain above Rowling on that ‘Rich List’ give as great a percentage of their money to good causes and also pay their income taxes in full. For Rowling, that tax bill, one she could avoid by secreting her money off-shore, comes to between £40 and 50 million annually. The richest citizens pay a lot more, incredibly, but are they creating and supporting multiple charities in proportion to Rowling?

I said at the start that I was defining “important” as “fame, influence, and worthy of discussion.” I get that I’m changing the rules here more than a little; writing checks for unimaginable sums does not equate to being famous, influential, or a rich vein to explore by deep mining a la Ruskin. The Times article, though, makes clear that being famous for her charity is not part of the philanthropy importance-equation as it must be for her political efforts for women’s rights and to promote her books and films. Except for her occasional fund raising gigs for Lumos, she has been largely mute about her charitable giving (which, of course, makes it that much more laudable).

Still, I’ll allow that she may not be even very famous for her philanthropy. No way she wins the Man-on-the-Street or the Family Feud tests: “Name a famous philanthropist.”

I won’t cede the point on influence, though; the lives she has saved and changed via Lumos, the research and care she has funded via Volant, and the children protected from “transitioning” and the women not injured or killed in what were once “safe spaces” via the Women’s Fund and Borea add up to influence of the inestimable kind, true charity. More on that twist in a second.

(b) There is No Philanthropist who is More Famous and Influential

I’m going to agree without disputation that the Super Billionaires give much more money to charity and fund global initiatives that dwarf Rowling’s contributions and projects.

The only one I can think of, however, who is not making political or ideology-based donations disguised as philanthropy a la Soros, is Bill Gates. I’m not a fan of the man or his vaccination initiatives, but for measures of fame and influence giving away $200 billion to your Foundation and pledging to give away all but 1% of the remaining $108 billion, means fame and influence that Rowling could never match. He’s changed the course of philanthropy according to experts in that field and millions of lives, for better or worse, in the process.

So, Rowling’s philanthropy is not “very famous” or “the most famous,” with a bit of wiggle on the matter of influence. Is it important in the way that her story-telling and feminism are, i.e., will it make us reflect more on what it means to be human and to lead more meaningful lives in the process?

(C) Rowling’s Philanthropy is Challenging and Worthy of Investigation and Discussion

In the interview exclusive for The Times, in answer to a question about why she gives what she does, Rowling offered her “lower middle class” childhood in Chepstow (where she witnessed rather than experienced the poverty of less fortunate classmates) as well as her hand to mouth existence in Edinburgh when she returned from Portugal as a single mother. Late last month, though, she responded to a tweet accusing her of being trans-obsessed rather than properly feminist with a laundry list of financial gifts she has made in support of women’s groups and causes:

This [accusation] is a lie, and an easily provable lie. I’ve spent the best part of three decades funding initiatives and donating to charities serving vulnerable women, including domestic violence shelters. The charitable trust I set up in 2000 focuses on alleviating social deprivation, with a focus on women and children, including female refugees. I’ve funded an initiative to help female ex-prisoners secure jobs, I helped fly professional women out of Afghanistan because they were in danger from the Taliban, I’ve publicly voiced my support for women’s reproductive rights, I founded and fund a women-only rape crisis centre and I’ve campaigned for and funded projects to help single mothers.

I myself am a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, as trans activists never tire of reminding me, whether to hope it happens to me again, or assert, as Maugham has, that I was left with unresolved trauma that leaves me irrational on the subject of physical risk to women.

Rowling, then, seems to say that the inspiration for her charitable giving is distinguishable from the motivation for it.

Her philanthropy may have been inspired by her experiences as a single mother on the dole to give generously when the Potter ocean liner ‘ship came in,’ giving that includes paying her taxes:

Rowling has previously spoken of the debt she felt she owed to the welfare state as a single mother receiving benefits while writing the first Harry Potter book.

She said: “When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become, was there to break the fall.“It would have been contemptible to scarper to the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque.”

Rowling said she makes a conscious decision to pay full taxes in the UK, refusing to live in “the limbo of some tax haven” and criticising “greedy tax exiles”.

What motivates her philanthropy, though, seems in large part to be her feminist core beliefs, whence her self-defense on Twixter late last month.

When explaining the importance of Rowling’s writing and her feminism above I leaned heavily into how each fostered in those who studied her work and her core beliefs and activism around women’s issues reflection about the central questions of human existence. You may or may not have embraced those assertions-cum-arguments which were founded on the premise that Man is an image of God designed to grow in His likeness.

The argument for the importance of Rowling’s philanthropy does not have the supports of her being very famous as a philanthropist, not to mention her not being the most famous, as it did with her work as a writer and as feminist. I think, though, given the nature of philanthropy, literally ‘the love of human kind,’ that her generosity not being especially famous despite her celebrity and recent notoriety, almost infamy, speaks to the sincerity of her charity. She’s not in it for the positive publicity that she could use to boost her brand or for the tax breaks involved; she gives because she feels and thinks that taking care of less fortunate others with the largesse of her earnings is simply the right thing to do.

That she does it to advance women’s issues, especially those touching mothers and their children, and the science of care and the possible cure of the neurological degenerative illness that killed her mother rather than to generic ‘for the good of humanity’ causes or political factions speaks to the personal nature of her donations. They spring from her life experience, core beliefs, and defining traumas rather than conceptual markers pulled from a hat, all of which very personal choices reflect the centrality of a mother’s love — sacrificial, selfless, and unconditional — in her worldview. See ‘The Blue Bunny’ and ‘Rowling, Ring Writing, and Maternal Love’ for an exploration of how a mother’s love is the author’s go-to story stand-in and symbol for the salvific love of Christ the Logos.

The principal discovery or revelation in Christmas Pig for this reader, something akin in my mind to literary alchemy, ring composition, and psychomachia in importance with respect to grasping the artistry and meaning of Rowling’s work, is her use of maternal love as a symbol of our metaphysical origin in God’s Love, the Logos, our hope of victory over death. This selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love, typical of that between mother and child, is tied in Rowling’s work, from Philosopher’s Stone to Christmas Pig, with symbols of Christ and triumph over evil and over death. By “tied” I mean it generates these things, just as Jack’s thoughts of his Mum and reaching out to CP as the touchstone of that love create by iconological correspondence the Johannine light breaking through the finding hole in Bother-Its-Gone that saves the boy and his toy from certain death.

The Boy Who Lived, of course, is protected by his mother’s love and sacrificial death from Voldemort’s death curse in the Godric’s Hollow Potter home. Harry’s love for his parents moves him to pursue the Philosopher’s Stone in his first year at Hogwarts – and it is the maternal love that suffuses him so entirely that it burns Quirreldemort as he attempts to kill the boy before the Mirror of Erised which saves him again. His mother appears to him in the Goblet series pivot and in the Hallows finale in the Forbidden Forest walk to his own sacrificial death with similar effects with respect to Christian symbolism – the Stone, the Phoenix Song cage-generation, and the Via Dolorosa markers – and Harry’s rising from certain death or something like death against all odds.

Mum is not so much in visible evidence in the other four books that she is in the series axis of Stone, Goblet, and Hallows, but Harry’s taking the part of the Logos Heart in the soul triptych in those novels, his “saving people thing,” is the exteriorization of his mother’s love, of which love he is the living symbol. As Dumbledore insists over the boy’s objection, this is his unique power and one that the Dark Lord “knows not.”

Re-read the opening of the Hallows dialogue between Harry and the Dark Lord in the Great Hall as they circle each other in their duel to the death. Harry mentions his mother’s three appearances in Stone, Goblet, and Hallows and that it was his intentional doing “what my mother did” that protects everyone fighting Voldemort (738). Poor Tom Riddle, Jr., of course, who never knew a mother’s love, still doesn’t understand; he derides “Dumbledore’s favorite solution, love, which he claimed conquered death” which power “did not prevent me from stamping out your Mudblood mother like a cockroach, Potter” (739).

The “life and light” that “blazed” in the Great Hall after Harry’s victory, the Paschal sunrise at death’s symbolic and salvific death, is the “life and light” of the world, the Johannine Logos. “In [the Logos] was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:4-5). Maternal love, the purest correspondent, symbol, and vehicle of God’s love in human experience, in Rowling’s work is life-saving and death-destroying when a character identifies with it entirely, to the point of the “accidental” ego-self’s extinction.

Rowling may not be, almost certainly isn’t very famous or the most famous philanthropist in the world. Nor does she give the most money to not for profit causes.

I think, though, she may still be the most important philanthropist because of the excellence of her example, an example beyond not beating the drum of self-celebration for her generosity. She gives in the way a mother loves her child, a love she experienced as the daughter of Anne Volant Rowling, as the single mum of Jessica, and as the mother of her two children with Neil Murray and because, I’m guessing, that love is her most profound experience of what is Real in the world.

If you don’t think that Rowling is consumed by thoughts of what is Real or Absolute in human existence, review Dumbledore’s final exchange with Harry Potter at the otherworldly King’s Cross in Deathly Hallows, Strike’s Skegness conversation with Robin about astrology in Troubled Blood, and the Blue Bunny’s sacrifice to save Jack in Christmas Pig when he realizes the boy is “real.”

And she gives from that place within her. As should we all. Rowling is arguably the most important writer and feminist because of her global celebrity and influence; she is, I think, the most important philanthropist because of the radiant quality of her example to each of us individually. Just as she does not have hundreds of billions to give away as do Bezos, Musk, Soros, and Gates but does what she can with her hundreds of millions, so we, without her fortune can do our best as givers with what we have by offering our pennies, relatively speaking, to those in need around us and to causes we support because of our heart’s direction consequent to life experience.

Which brings me to my concluding points.

Conclusions

First, Rowling Studies are not a waste of anyone’s time. Man is the Story-Telling Animal, Rowling is the most successful story-teller of our time (and one more than familiar with its traditional craft), ergo reading her work closely is an excellent way to understand what it means to be human. Not to mention that there’s plenty more to be discovered about her stories.

The same can be said of her standing on the barricades against “transgenderism,” because of the centrality of understanding Man as an image of God in His Essence and Energies even Rowling does not share this Perennialist understanding. And of her charitable giving.

Second, Rowling herself is a fascinating person whose fame and influence as writer, feminist-activist, and philanthropist makes her something of a transparency for our historical period, for better or worse. Thinking about her and her life choices and priorities is a short-cut to meaningful reflection about living in the 21st Century.

And —

Third and last, there is an intersectionality to these three Rowling activities — her writing, feminist beliefs, and charities —in which each informs the others, a Venn diagram with large areas of overlap. The writing fortune feeds the philanthropy which is largely about feminist causes and helping individual women, which feminism informs, sometimes more, sometimes less what Rowling is writing, Shed and Lake. The philanthropy reflects a key theme in her works and the driving force of her philanthropic targets.

In the coming weeks as we approach The Presence’s 60th birthday, I’ll be writing posts about Rowling’s work as I have since 2002. I hope this longish post helps you understand why I haven’t blushed about that and won’t start now, however frequently I get the “tone of disdain.” Rowling Studies is about to take a new turn, believe it or not, and I’m excited about starting or renewing that conversation with you here. Here’s hoping when I am accused of going too far that you’ll recall this post about the importance of the subject and why Rowling is the most important writer, feminist, and philanthropist of our times.