As promised, Harry Potter author and all-round excellent individual JK Rowling has treated fans to a brand new short story for Halloween. The story is a profile of one Dolores Umbridge, otherwise known as one of the most villainous villains in the Potter books and films, and the Hogwarts headmistress you love to hate.
The story was published on Pottermore, but if, like us, you signed up just so you could officially get sorted into a Hogwarts house and then never looked at it again, don’t worry. You don’t need to remember your username – *cough* centaurschlong92 *cough* – because the good people at Today have reprinted it for you.
You can go ahead and read the whole thing here. The piece fills in a lot of background details about the character, including her family history, the reasons behind her hatred of muggles, and her swift rise to power at the Ministry of Magic:
Even at seventeen, Dolores was judgemental, prejudiced and sadistic, although her conscientious attitude, her saccharine manner towards her superiors, and the ruthlessness and stealth with which she took credit for other people’s work soon gained her advancement.
The really interesting bit comes later, however, when Rowling says a few words about the inspiration behind the character, revealing it to be a teacher of her own, with whom she clashed in her younger days:
What sticks in my mind is her pronounced taste for twee accessories. I particularly recall a tiny little plastic bow slide, pale lemon in colour that she wore in her short curly hair. I used to stare at that little slide, which would have been appropriate to a girl of three, as though it was some kind of repellent physical growth. She was quite a stocky woman, and not in the first flush of youth, and her tendency to wear frills where (I felt) frills had no business to be, and to carry undersized handbags, again as though they had been borrowed from a child’s dressing-up box, jarred, I felt, with a personality that I found the reverse of sweet, innocent and ingenuous.
Rowling insists that this woman is not the “real” Dolores Umbridge – she did not look like a toad, and was not particularly sadistic or vicious – and that she merely borrowed elements of her to create the distasteful character.
It seems, though, that the author does not approve of your cute pictures of kitty cats:
I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world. I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle. A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity.
Wow. The claws finally come out.
Image via Fanpop
