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Inside the Classical Mind of the Woman Who Inspired Generations
Author Solomon Schmidt offers an inside look at his new book, A Pen to Change the World, and the author whose legacy belongs alongside that of The Inklings.
Once gathered around a fire in the back room of an Oxford pub each Tuesday, a small company of writers considered philosophy, poetry, myth, and worlds of enchantment. The Eagle and Child hosted C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and their fellow Inklings; thinkers whose imaginative worlds, redemptive storytelling, and command of classical tradition would shape generations.
These men transformed modern fantasy by recovering mythic and medieval traditions for a new age. But decades later, a woman would bring a similarly classical moral imagination to an even larger twenty-first-century audience. Her stories, filled with sacrifice, resurrection, and the perennial contest between love and death, became some of the most beloved books in history. Yet the story of her life, concealed within her books, has remained largely hidden in plain sight. Until now.
Author Solomon Schmidt first studied J.K. Rowling while developing a literary tour through England and Scotland devoted to Lewis, and Tolkien. After requests to include Rowling in the lineup, he began to research her life. In the process, he discovered something remarkable: no comprehensive biography had been published about one of the world’s most famous female authors in nearly twenty-five years.
Schmidt had grown up in an environment deeply suspicious of Harry Potter. But when he finally read the series, particularly Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the moral and spiritual depth of its conclusion overturned many of his assumptions.
Who was the woman behind this extraordinary world? Schmidt dove into studying her published writings and archived interviews, consulted specialists, and spoke with members of her extended family and people who had known or worked with her.
The result is A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling, a sweeping independent biography that traces the family history back to 1877, childhood influences, familial wounds, intellectual formation, and remarkable success behind the woman who created the best-selling book series of all time.
A Pen to Change the World offers more than the familiar story of a struggling single mother who became an international literary phenomenon. Schmidt presents Rowling as an intellectually serious woman whose imagination was formed by classical literature, Christian symbolism, personal grief, and an enduring search for meaning, placing her among the ranks of English giants like Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Ms. Rowling’s pen did not merely change the world, nor the circumstances of her life, but became the place where she examined her own history, transforming its wounds by grappling with the reality of death.
Although she was not raised in a practicing Christian household, Rowling attended church independently as a young woman and was baptized apart from her family. She would return to Christian worship in adulthood, and a battered print of Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus, hung on her wall while under it she penned her famous series. Schmidt argues that her faith is far more significant to both her life and her fiction than many readers realize.
The themes of redemption, resurrection, and sacrificial love in Harry Potter, Schmidt told The Swish, arose from a “deeply, deeply spiritual place.” The landmark series is not an allegory, nor does it offer a simple reproduction of Christian doctrine. Yet its underlying moral architecture is recognizably Christian. The story begins with a mother willingly surrendering her life for her child. Her sacrificial blood protects him from the dark power that sought his death. It culminates in that child, now a young man, freely walking toward death to save those he loves. The comparisons only begin there.
“Think of all the reasons J.K. would have to think that good does not win,” Schmidt said, referencing Rowling’s personal abuse, grief, poverty and rejection. “And yet in Harry Potter, good wins.”
At the center of Rowling’s moral imagination was her mother, Anne, whose love and early death profoundly shaped her understanding of goodness, grief, and sacrifice. Anne fostered a love of reading and imagination for her daughters from a young age, and that influence even reaches Harry Potter’s deepest moral conviction: that a mother’s self-giving love possesses a power that evil cannot comprehend or overcome.
The Examined Life
Schmidt explores the moment Rowling arrived at the University of Exeter to earn her Bachelor of Arts degree in French and Classics and found herself drawn toward the Classics department in search of what she later called “ancient wisdom.” What she encountered was a tradition that understood education not simply as the acquisition of knowledge, but as the examination and formation of the soul. This Socratic self-examination she found taught a person to distinguish appearance from reality, and to form an appetite for what was objectively good.
Rowling’s fiction reflects this instinct. In her 2008 Harvard commencement address, she shared that it was a quote from Plutarch she discovered as a student that taught her an invaluable life lesson: “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” Her heroes are not distinguished merely by talent or ancestry but they become courageous by choosing courage, loyal by practicing loyalty, and loving by surrendering the desire to preserve themselves at any cost.
“This is a woman who has deeply thought about her own past,” Schmidt said. “And when you look at her books, they are full of her past.” Harry, like his creator, wears glasses, feels out of place, and longs to escape a difficult home. He even shares Rowling’s birthday. The blue Ford Anglia in which Ron rescues him resembles a childhood friend’s car that once carried Rowling away from an unhappy home. In fiction, it carries Harry toward friendship, belonging, and a different kind of household.
The Mirror of Erised in her first book makes this self-examination even more obvious. Harry does not see wealth, fame, or power, but his dead parents. Rowling later recognized how much of her grief for her mother, who she lost at the age of just twenty-five, was written into the scene. Yet the mirror cannot restore what has been lost, and Harry must turn from its image and form relationships among the living. The past must be faced truthfully, but it must not become an idol.
Rowling’s fiction repeatedly rejects the belief that someone’s ancestry determines their destiny. Someone’s past supplies the material of a life, but it does not have the authority to dictate its conclusion. A Pen to Change the World explores this reflection in Rowling’s own life.
Reverence for the Body
Schmidt recounts how while studying the classics, Rowling encountered Hector’s death in Homer’s Iliad and was deeply moved. The classic tale tells how after killing the Trojan prince, Achilles drags his body behind a chariot and denies him burial. Moral order is restored only when Hector’s father, Priam, begs for the return of his son’s body. Confronted by a grieving father, Achilles remembers his own, and rage gives way to pity.
For Rowling, this story converged with personal grief. Rowling’s mother died from complications of multiple sclerosis at forty-five. She never learned that her daughter was writing an epic. According to Schmidt, Rowling desperately wanted to see her mother’s body, but was not permitted to do so.
The ancient and personal memories of the classical reverence for the body meet in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for Rowling. When Cedric Diggory is murdered, Harry refuses to abandon his body, even as Voldemort returns and Harry’s own life is in danger. He cannot restore Cedric, but he can refuse to let evil claim the final disposition of his body. He carries him home to those who love him.
The scene also reflects a Christian understanding of embodiment. God takes on flesh in the Incarnation; Christ’s body is mourned and entombed; and Christian hope culminates not in escape from the body, but in resurrection.
Death therefore remains serious even within an imaginary world for Rowling. Voldemort’s attempt to master mortality deforms him, while the Resurrection Stone offers only a shadow of restoration. Harry must honor the dead, just as Rowling learned to do.
The Transformation
Rowling’s fascination with alchemy may offer the clearest pattern for her classical vision of transformation, Schmidt points out. Beyond her interest in turning base metals into gold, the purification of matter became an image of the disordered soul becoming wise and whole for her.
The title of Rowling’s first book highlighted this tradition, as The Philosopher’s Stone promises wealth and unnaturally prolonged life. Voldemort desires it because he fears death and seeks power without surrender. The character of Nicolas Flamel accepts its destruction and his own mortality. Here, each one’s character is revealed by what each is willing to relinquish.
Schmidt believes Rowling was fascinated by the spiritual possibility of the personality being changed from base metal into gold, “from selfish or depressed or broken to hopeful” and wise.
Rowling drew from the raw material of her own life: familial wounds, bereavement, domestic abuse, depression, motherhood, faith, and imagination. Rather than stuffing them down, she submitted them to the transforming work of the story.
Harry undergoes the same purification as a neglected child who discovers that he is famous and gifted and might easily become proud, resentful, or hungry for power. Instead, each trial he faces in the series strips away the illusion that power can preserve everything he loves. In fact, his final victory depends on surrender.
The Christian architecture becomes clearest from Rowling in Deathly Hallows as a willing victim lays down his life, sacrificial love protects a community, and the apparent triumph of death becomes the means by which evil is defeated.
“The entire story,” Schmidt said, “is predicated on the idea of the blood of a self-sacrificial death protecting you from the fallen one, the dark lord.”
Harry Potter is not a strict Christian allegory, nor is Harry supposed to be Christ exemplified as a young wizard. But its movement is recognizably Christian; life is found through surrender, love becomes visible through sacrifice, and death is not permitted the final word.
Rowling had ample reason to believe in the worst; that good would fail and that she had no future or redemption. A Pen to Change the World tells how she endured grief, abuse, poverty, depression, and thoughts of suicide, and her work at Amnesty International exposed her to accounts of torture and political violence. Her stories do not erase this suffering or offer easy restoration but transform that suffering into courage, compassion, service, and love to inspire generations.
Every woman isn’t called to record the trials of her life in a literary phenomenon, but we all will have to decide what we will do with life’s challenges. Each of us has a complicated past, and the roots we grow often draw from grief, disappointment, family history, and the places and people that formed us, as Rowling experienced. We can allow the suffering of life to harden us into bitterness, or use each opportunity to patiently reflect, forgive, create, and love.
Rowling’s life as outlined in A Pen to Change the World also demonstrates just why women should take our intellectual formation seriously. Studying the classics isn’t confined to a classroom syllabus, but gives language for understanding death, courage, loyalty, and ultimately, the dignity of humanity. What we read and engage with forms the moral imagination we will draw on in every season of our lives.
Like the Inklings gathered in the back room of The Eagle and Child, Rowling drew from ancient wisdom, Christian hope, and the difficult soil of her own life to create a world that transformed ours. Her work offers a vision of rootedness that isn’t about wanting to be nostalgic or remain captive to a wound. When we honor our roots and don’t romanticise everything we’ve experienced or remain bound to them, we can examine our life honestly and preserve what is good, then prune what is disordered so that something life-giving can grow. We may not wield a pen like Rowling, but we each possess gifts capable of shaping our homes, communities, and culture. When those gifts are properly tended and rooted in truth, goodness, and beauty, they, too, can become a source of new life.
Solomon Schmidt’s new work is an excellent and well-researched example of how one of the world’s most famous authors changed her world, and ours. A Pen to Change the World can be found wherever books are sold.
Solomon Schmidt is a 22-year-old historian and the author of ten books. He began writing at age twelve and has since produced the eight-volume History Bites series and two major biographies. His latest book is the first complete biography of J.K. Rowling, featuring original research, new revelations and previously unpublished photographs. Solomon also hosts the History Bites YouTube channel and leads historical tours throughout England and Scotland. He lives near Buffalo, New York.
“Rowling’s mother was tenderhearted. She was sweet. She was hospitable. She was bookish and gave J.K. her love of books. She encouraged J.K.’s passion to write. She was strong. She suffered immensely, but was still kind to people in the face of it. She is no more and no less than the reason Harry Potter is such a profound story of love.”
—Solomon Schmidt, in discussion with The Swish Editor-in-Chief, Hannah Brusven
Originally published in the Autumn 2026 issue of The Swish Magazine.
Explore the book: A Pen to Change the World: The Life of J.K. Rowling
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