An advert in The Guardian led Rowling to move to Porto in Portugal to teach English as a foreign language.She taught at night, and began writing in the day whilst listening to Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. While there she met Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in a bar, after sharing a mutual interest in Jane Austen. They married on 16 October 1992 and their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal. Rowling had previously suffered a miscarriage. They separated on 17 November 1993, 13 months and one day after their marriage.Biographers have suggested that Rowling suffered domestic abuse during her marriage, although the full extent is unknown. In an interview with The Daily Express, Arantes said on their final night together he had dragged her out of their home at five in the morning and slapped her hard.In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland, with three chapters of Harry Potter in her suitcase.
Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew." Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:
Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
– J. K. Rowling, "The fringe benefits of failure", 2008.
During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless."
Rowling was left in "despair" following the arrival of her estranged husband in search of herself and her daughter. She obtained anorder of restraint and Arantes returned to Portugal, with Rowling filing for divorce in August 1994. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995 at the Moray House School of Education, at Edinburgh University, after completing her first novel while having survived on state benefits. She wrote in many cafés, especially Nicolson's Café, and The Elephant House, (the former owned by her brother-in-law Roger Moore) wherever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. In a 2001 BBC interview, Rowling denied the rumour that she wrote in local cafés to escape from her unheated flat, remarking, "I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat in Edinburgh in midwinter. It had heating." Instead, as she stated on the American TV programme A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafés was because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.
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