I check the Robert Galbraith website every few months because, though I signed up for update messages to be sent to my email address, I have never received one. The posts there as a rule do not contain new information but the summaries given almost always reward a reading.

I learned, for example, from the ‘Charlotte and Strike’ page there that Milady Beserko had run away from the Bedales School at age fourteen. That detail is in the books  — “… made headlines in her youth when she went missing from Bedales for seven days, causing a national search… admitted to rehab at the age of 25…” (Silkworm, ch 24) — but it never caught my attention.

Turns out that school was not chosen at random or invented by the author but is a real place and a perfect match with what the godless Campbell aristocrats would think of as a perfect training ground for their offspring. 

Bedales — pronounced ‘Bee-dales’ — was completely secular, no chapel from the start, and co-educational, too, from the get-go and relatively “enlightened” about boy-girl relationships.

[Founder John] Badley took a non-denominational approach to religion and the school has never had a chapel: its relatively secular teaching made it attractive in its early days to non-conformists, agnostics, Quakers, Unitarians and liberal Jews, who formed a significant element of its early intake. The school was also well known and popular in some Cambridge and Fabian intellectual circles with connections to the Wedgwoods, Darwins, Huxleys, and Trevelyans. Books such as A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons? and L’Education nouvelle popularised the school on the Continent, leading to a cosmopolitan intake of Russian and other European children in the 1920s.

I suppose, liberal and tony as the school seems to be, the question has to be why Charlotte would have felt the need to run away? We know Charlotte’s family was bonkers but that seems insufficient explanation for her peculiar madness. Some students have written about how they hated it there.

Is it credible that Charlotte, as with Strike and his itinerant childhood, Robin with the rape at university, and Rowling with her Bad Dad, is who she is consequent to abuse of some kind at her boarding school? As beautiful as she is, forgive me, it might be more remarkable even she hadn’t experience abuse or assault from an older student or from a teacher.

Check out the Wikipedia page for Bedales alumni and let me know if you recognize any characters that resonate with Charlotte Campbell.

All that to say that surfing the Robert-Galbraith site can trigger reflections on the story and characters you might not have had otherwise.

There’s also a Relationships Quiz which was fun. I got 19 out of 20 and I bet you can guess the one I missed (it’s the trick question meant to trip up know-it-alls that are in a hurry to finish the test as quickly as possible). I recommend you check it out, not only for the satisfaction of outscoring me, but also as a point of reflection.

As with the Charlotte and Cormoran page, the quiz emphasizes the relationships aspect of the story more than, y’know, the murder mysteries or the Leda Strike seeming-suicide. If you think that is accidental or an arbitrary emphasis, you’re making the mistake that kept me from the perfect score on the quiz! Cheers!

Pratibha Rai is an Oxford University graduate and she has been a Harry Potter partisan and pundit since 2001. Her research today mostly concerns the sociology of collecting in early modern Europe. She enjoys finding parallels between Harry Potter and history of art. In late 2019 she shared with us what she discovered about that life-saving short-cut antidote, the Bezoar; the next year it was On the Naming Fear & Jinxing in Harry Potter. Those familiar with her work will be as excited as I am about her latest research below. Enjoy!

Brush as Wand: Portraiture in Harry Potter

At Hogwarts, it is an age-old tradition for eminent witches and wizards to sit for portraits in order to preserve their legacy after death. Their framed likenesses cover the walls of Hogwarts like ivy, chronicling the rich heritage of wizarding history such as the plethora of portraits we see surrounding the moving staircase (250 portraits altogether in the Philosophers’ Stone movie). The artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) wrote in his treatise De pictura (1435) that a painting ought to be an open window through which the subject might be viewed. Muggle artists have perennially sought to achieve this by imbuing their scenes with optical effects and using oil paints to give portraits a sheen of real life but in Hogwarts, the subject can literally be viewed and even heard from their canvas as they act as agents in their own right to advance the narrative. In this article, I hope to unpack Rowling’s often overlooked fascination with portraiture in the Harry Potter series and how the books use the artistic conflict between truth and illusionism to dramatic effect. [Read more…]

I spotted this tweet from J. K. Rowling’s agents, The Blair Partnership last Friday:

Spotted in The Times! Some books are good at any age… pic.twitter.com/bwppskhXRo

— The Blair Partnership (@TBP_agency) May 6, 2022

The tweet was responding from an article in the Times newspaper about the latest report from Renaissance on the reading habits of school children in the UK. Perhaps a surprise to followers of social media campaigns, J. K. Rowling has increased in popularity over the last three years of recording, with the Harry Potter series holding the top three places for favourite books for primary school pupils. For some take-aways and to download the report, see after the break.

[Read more…]

I had actually forgotten I was supposed to get a prize for being an audience member in Game #2 of the Hogwarts Tournament of Houses, where my fellow Ravenclaws defeated Slytherin, with the help of the studio audience play-along with our handy little signal devices. After several enthusiastic emails from the company charged with sending these out, the prizes finally arrived this week.  I was rather hoping for some unique-to-the-show, available-nowhere-else item, but what we were sent was a Ravenclaw shaker bottle, available for purchase on Amazon. I had recently made a resolution to try to stay better hydrated, so I will certainly enjoy this. Still, I was a bit disappointed to get the erroneous cinematic raven emblem; especially since there is a slightly cheaper but more book-authentic version with the bronze color and the eagle available..  I wasn’t the only one disappointed, as seen here in a video posted by a fellow audience member. 

The ToH stickers on the box were pretty cool, though, and since I was lucky enough to attend with my husband we have two of them. I’m going to try to peel it off the box and recycle it for use somewhere else. Stay tuned to find out if my Ravenclaw ingenuity makes this a successful endeavor.

I am still enjoying the Covid-19 mask and the t-shirt they let me keep, though, both of which are eagle- and bronze-bedecked.

And, of course I still treasure the memories of the fun I had of seeing, and playing the game.  And I met many awesome people I met in the process, some of which have become online pals. Best of all was the joy of cheering Hogpro’s own David Martin onto victory! Look for me to be toting a my nice new water bottle around next year’s Queen City Mischief and Magic Festival, which will be back, in person, in 2022.