The landmark event of what we are calling the Fourth Generation of Rowling Studies, in which the author’s life events are folded into an appreciation of her writing accomplishments will be the appearance of a ‘critical biography’ of merit that has this as its only purpose, that is, relating the subject’s life events and reading those works strictly within that context. See Brian Boyd’s magisterial two volume biography of Nabokov, Claire Tomalin’s lives of Dickens, Austen, and Wollstonecraft, and Lois Potter’s Shakespeare: A Critical Biography for examples of the defining work of this type.

Given the quality of her advisers and her own remarkable self-awareness, I think it can safely be assumed Rowling, Inc., has plans to take charge of her legacy now, lest a click-bait bio-critical narrative commissioned by her Genderist enemies today be set in stone until long after her death. Representing as her PR team does a personality famous for pre-emptive strikes that backfoot her opponents (a la Hermione in Order of the Phoenix), Fortress Rowling’s best move will be to authorize a critical biography, assuming one is not in progress already — one to which she generously contributes her open answers to questions and urges her heretofore silent friends and family to do the same — that sets the critical ‘Lake’ lenses through which all future readers will read her work. The authorized critical biographer, of course, will be expected to be more than sympathetic to and knowledgeable of Rowling’s views, experience, and artistry.

The trick? The best critical biographies are those written many, many years after the subject’s death. How will Team Rowling identify the best critical biographer today for a still-breathing literary figure? Which one will best be able to write about a living subject when the field has largely been one for literary historians? Here are my best guesses about how this could be done, seven guiding principles, and three suggestions for who should write Rowling’s authorized critical biography. All after the jump! [Read more…]

Dame Maggie Smith died yesterday, age 89.

I do not envy the actor and actress chosen to play Severus Snape and Minerva McGonagall for the upcoming television adaptations of the seven Harry Potter novels. The ghosts of Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith will haunt them. The love felt by fandom for this actor and actress, compounded or cemented by grief at their deaths, will make the new Hogwarts professors seem like unworthy usurpers.

Dame Maggie Smith once said about the two roles that made her globally famous well into her dotage, “I am deeply grateful for the work in Potter and indeed Downton but it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying. I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.”

Smith also added that she and Alan Rickman, may he rest in peace, used to joke around about how their roles in the franchise almost entirely consisted of reaction shots. The actress stated that theatre was her favorite medium and the only reason she hopped onto screen roles was because the work she wanted to do in theatre was just not happening.

The Potter film franchise was blessed with many great character actors and actresses. My favorites were Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs, Ralph Fiennes, and Maggie Smith. Not a one of them, I think, “was acting in those things” but wearing a mask and costume in order to animate a character already very much alive in the audience’s imagination. Most of the necessary acting was superfluous consequent to Rowling’s success in bringing these characters to life on the codex page.

That being said, however wasted the talents of the Potter franchise’s ensemble cast was, Dame Maggie Smith’s Professor McGonagall and Rickman’s Snape managed to forever erase my imagination’s image of their characters and replace it with their own. This is true of the child-actors who played Harry, Ron, and Hermione as well, but I am glad rather than annoyed that my ‘head canon’ McGonagall and Snape are the gifted actress and actor who played those roles.

If you have not seen Dame Maggie Smith in anything but the Harry Potter film adaptations or Downton Abbey, I hope you will watch The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, playing the title role of which film won Smith her first Academy Award (Best Actress, 1969). She went on to win the ‘Triple Crown of Acting‘ with more than one Emmy and Tony Award. I top this post with the climactic scene of that film as a haunting tribute to this genius of stage and screen. She deserves to be remembered for more than a “reaction shot” role in which her talents were rarely deployed and which she only took on because she had no offers to work in theater, her great love.

Dame Maggie Smith, requiescat in pace, memory eternal.