A recent article in the New Statesman argued that the “nastiness” of J. K. Rowling’s fiction — dark themes such as “child abuse, murder, and torture” — “has bubbled up to the surface like lava” since the author got involved in “gender-critical politics.”
The author, Nick Hilton, concludes that Rowling’s most recent works, her crime series under the pen name Robert Galbraith, “might just make her Britain’s nastiest novelist.” He writes:
In her novels, Rowling skewers the far right — meanwhile, she has liked a post from a far-right account on Twitter. She condemns vicious keyboard warriors and hysterical reactionaries in her books but engages in similar behaviour herself online. In another world, JK Rowling could be a character in a book by Robert Galbraith: brittle, insecure, cruel.
When she assumed the Galbraith pseudonym a decade ago, Rowling was putting on a mask. The mask of anonymity, the mask of detachment, the mask of adulthood. But on another level, she was taking off a mask — and showing herself in full, nasty glory for the first time.
For rebuttals, including the counterargument that it’s a sexist double standard to expect women to write only nice, ladylike things, see here and here.
Interestingly, when the Harry Potter series first made a splash in the early 2000s, Rowling was attacked from the right. Back then, her novels offended the sensibilities of some Christians who were disturbed by its treatment of dark magic and worried it would encourage occult practices. The fiction is evil, they concluded, and so its author is suspect. Today’s anti-Rowling progressives have this in reverse: The author is evil, and so her fiction is suspect.