Hermione is pronounced “Her-MY-oh-knee”.

Hermione is the name from Shakespeare’s ‘A Winter’s Tale’, but “[JKR]‘s Hermione bears very little relation to that Hermione, but it just seemed the sort of name that a pair of professional dentists, who likes to prove how clever they were … [they] gave their daughter a nice, unusual name that no-one could pronounce!” Hermione needed an unusual name because she was so swotty and annoying.

Hermione is a “caricature of what [JKR] was when [she] was eleven”.

Harry and Hermione are platonic friends.

Most people don’t care much about Hermione in the sense that they think she is too clever and will get through it somehow. She is not seen as “vulnerable”, unlike her cohort Ron Weasley who had readers “worried” about his fate in the latter books.

Harry is particularly talented in Defence Against the Dark Arts, the one area, besides Quidditch, where he is better than Hermione.

Hermione “lightens up” after ‘Goblet of Fire’.

If Rowling needs to tell the readers something, she lets Hermione or Dumbledore say it.

Rowling initially planned to write in a younger sibling for Hermione, however she was put off so much that she felt that it would be “too late” to introduce her.

Rowling gave Hermione her ideal animagus for her patronus.

Hermione’s original surname was “Puckle”, but it didn’t suit her.

The very, very earliest drafts of ‘Philsopher’s Stone’ had the Potters living on a remote island, and Hermione’s dad seeing an explosion out at sea. He sailed out and found their bodies in the ruins of their house.

Rowling deliberately kept Hermione’s family “in the background”. They are very ordinary. Hermione’s younger sister would have been a Muggle if she had been in the books.

Rowling loved writing dialogue between Harry, Ron and Hermione.

If Hermione looked into the Mirror of Erised she would see the Trio “alive and unscathed and Voldemort finished”. She may also see herself in a romantic embrace.