Dolores Umbridge is a Harry Potter villain, for very good reason. She is actually scarier than Voldemort. I can’t help wondering where the author got her from. She is very real. She doesn’t have any special powers, she hasn’t created any Horcruxes. She is just a truly horrible person. (One thing we find out about her is that she sent the Dementors that nearly got Harry expelled.)
We have probably all met a Dolores at some stage. I know I have, as a campus principal at my school. She didn’t have the power to hit or otherwise assault students, no teacher here does, but she did have the power to make her staff miserable. I remember one, a very good teacher, who was so badly treated that she had to leave the school and definitely had PTSD. And no, the kids didn’t like her either - she went on a bus tour interstate with them and some of the kids told me what she did on the bus and… Oh, dear!
Dolores Umbridge first appears in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, the fifth book in the series. She wears pink and has pictures and plates with kittens in her office. She might be mistaken for someone nice, but Hermione picks up just what she is at the first feast of the term.
Dolores was sent by the truly idiotic Minister of Magic, who refuses to believe that Voldemort is back. She makes sure that she does what she was sent to do, including not actually teaching Defence against the dark arts, tortures students, including Harry, and sacks staff she doesn’t like. She replaces Dumbledore as principal, so Harry and his friends get together to learn DADA as a hidden group they call Dumbledore’s Army. Harry is very good at the subject, so is able to teach the others what he knows, including how to summon a protective Patronus which usually comes in the form of an animal. Oddly, as you are supposed to start with a very happy memory, Dolores has one herself, a cat - scary to think what her happy memory is!
When she catches up with them, she wants Snape to give her a truth serum, but he lies and claims to have run out and not have the time to produce more. He is, after all, a good guy.
After all this, Hermione persuades her that there is something she is after in the Forbidden Forest and lures her there, where she is carried off by a herd of angry centaurs. They don’t kill her, because she turns up again in the last book, working for the Death Eater government. But she isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, is she?
She is one of the nastiest villains I have encountered, and scary because she is just human.
Have you ever met a Dolores Umbridge?
No need to tell you the books are all in print, because of course they are. But if you want an audiobook, there are many on YouTube as well as for sale on Apple Books and Kindle, and all of the ebooks have an enhanced edition which have some interesting features.
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