sovay: (I Claudius)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote 2018-08-28 06:16 am (UTC)

I saw a long article some years ago about John Nettleship, the teacher who was supposedly part of her inspiration for Snape.

Thank you; I'd read about him, but I hadn't seen that article. The photo circa 1980 is fantastic.

"John in his prime however was, in a good light and without his spectacles, almost supernaturally beautiful: like a cross between an early 19th century Romantic poet and a slightly undernourished pre-Raphaelite knight. He had, in particular, the best-shaped mouth I've ever seen on a bloke."

Because I came straight to this article from thinking about Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, it appears that John Nettleship has become my mental fancasting for that "pale, thin, poetical-looking person" who is the Raven King, whose straight, dark, longish hair gives him "something of the look of a Methodist preacher or a Romantic poet." I hope he would have been all right with that; he had to live with one fictional character already, plus apparently Richard III. This is the sort of thing that happens to people with interesting faces.

The article itself is a mix of really fascinating information, fandom politics, personal opinion, and psychogeography, the last of which I was totally not expecting, but then I wasn't expecting the discussion of reincarnation either. Or the Fisher King.

I laughed out loud at the caption "John claimed that this sequence, shot in the school science lab., showed Snape vaporising himself."

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