KIDS. They grow up, they leave home — it’s the empty nest syndrome, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It even happens when your kid is a wizard: and it won’t be long before Harry Potter’s all grown up and will have to manage on his own, living on in children’s imaginations but no longer in books by J. K. Rowling.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is number six in the series; there are due to be only seven (despite the BBC’s “news of the future” website for 2020 predicting that Rowling will come out with Harry Potter and the Mortgage Repayments of Doom). Rowling is still very young, as authors go. What will she do next?

It may not be easy to find her way. In the first place, it can be tough to shake off a character that has so gripped the public imagination. Poor Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to shake off Sherlock Holmes without success. When he killed him off at the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem, in Strand magazine in 1893, 20,000 people cancelled subscriptions. When he brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles, the magazine’s sales rose by 30,000 overnight. But few think of him for, say The Mystery of Cloomber or The Coming of the Fairies — or for the spiritualism that meant so much to him. As readers wanted more Holmes, they will want more Harry, even if they are told again and again that there won’t be any more. The success of what Rowling writes in the years to come will always, always be measured against the almost inconceivable success of the Potter books.

Perhaps she’ll choose to write books “for adults”, though many would argue that this is a distinction made by publishers, not writers. Then she will suffer the same fate as, say, Roald Dahl, who is thought of as a “children’s writer” despite the darkness of his shivery Tales of the Unexpected (very much for grown-ups) and his wonderful memoirs Boy and Going Solo.

Richmal Crompton is best remembered for the surpassingly wonderful Just William series — eight million copies sold in her lifetime — but she wrote 40 “serious” novels, and once indicated that William was something of a Frankenstein’s monster. Persephone Books recently republished her novel Family Roundabout; but William’s reputation is unlikely to suffer. More recently, Anne Fine is thought of, for the most part, as the author of such children’s classics as Flour Babies, Madame Doubtfire and The Tulip Touch; it’s less remarked that she is the author of fine novels for adults, such as Raking the Ashes and Telling Liddy.

For all that, it’s hard to imagine that Rowling will be discouraged. Harry Potter’s birth — his literary birth, as the son of the single mother who sat in an Edinburgh café to keep warm as she wrote — is well known: but is proof of Rowling’s resilience as a writer. If she wants to keep going, she’ll find a way. There will be life after Harry.

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