Rowling regrets mother not knowing Harry Potter

Best-selling author JK Rowling today revealed her mother died without knowing anything about Harry Potter.

The writer said she began working on the tales of the apprentice wizard just six months before her mother, Anne, died of multiple sclerosis (MS) at the age of 45.

Today she revealed it was a “real regret” that she never told her mother she was writing the stories, which would go on to be adored around the world.

The Edinburgh-based author – patron of the Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland - also voiced frustration at the level of funding available for research into the debilitating disease which claimed her mother’s life.

Rowling made the statements in a rare interview for a BBC Scotland documentary on the condition, which is being screened tomorrow.

Speaking about her mother, the author told the programme: “I started writing Harry six months before she died. That’s obviously a real regret, because I never told her I was even writing it.

“She knew I wanted to write – I’m not sure how seriously she took it.

“She never knew anything about Harry Potter at all.”

Rowling also spoke of her pain at witnessing the gradual decline of her mother, whom she had perceived as “invulnerable”, prior to her death in 1990.

“She had me very young. She had me when she was 20, so I was 25 when she died.

“When I left home, she was walking unaided. By the time I graduated, she was in a wheelchair and in the house she needed a walking frame.

“It was awful to watch.”

The author said her mother was showing marked signs of the illness for six or seven years before she was diagnosed.

She eventually went see a doctor when she experienced a numbness in her right arm which refused to go away.

Rowling told the documentary: “Then a year later, this numbness had spread over half of her torso.

“It took her over a year to go back and this time she was sent to see the neurologist who had done the first tests.

“She expected to be told she needed more tests and he just said, ’Well, you’ve got multiple sclerosis’.”

In 2006, multi-millionaire Rowling made a major cash donation to help set up a multiple sclerosis research centre at Edinburgh University, in the hope that a cure would be found one day.

Today she hit out at what she perceived as a general lack of funding for – and interest in – the condition, which affects around one in every 500 people in Scotland.

Rowling told the documentary, which was given a preview screening in Edinburgh today: “It’s a Cinderella of illnesses, you hear this all the time, because it’s under-funded, because it’s ignored.

“I think that it’s possibly common to a lot of neurological conditions. It just seems to be an area that has not seemed very sexy for funding.

“People get diagnosed and sent home. It’s a frustration to those of us whose family members do have MS that so little is being done, because it is a life-altering condition and a lot can be done now, so why isn’t that happening?”