After months of anticipation, a very great event occurred last Sunday: I became an aunt. Arguably, that was the least of the changes: my brother and sister-in-law became parents, two sets of existing parents became grandparents, and a small and rather wonderful girl came into being.
But as I am unable to comment on any of their mindsets with confidence, let us focus on me.
I am rather adrift as to what it means to be an aunt. Literature provides few useful guides. If I wanted to be a terrifyingly despotic aunt, or a meek spinster aunt, or an emotionally withholding aunt, I am overwhelmed with bookish inspiration. Children’s literature runneth over with aunts you would never want to expose your children to. But what about the kindly aunts?
Eva Ibbotson offers a few: the aunts in Magic Flutes are wonderful, as are the equally supportive aunts in The Dragonfly Pool, but they are a bit timid. Perhaps more suitable inspiration lies with the suffragette aunts in A Song for Summer, who love their niece even if they can’t understand why she would throw away an education to work at an eccentric boarding school. That sounds much more like me.
But Ibbotson also offers up some joyfully awful aunts in A Company of Swans and in some of her children’s books. She was, she admitted, a fan of using aunts in her books and deployed them in all their various facets.
And, of course, P.G. Wodehouse created aunts so terrifying I run from them as quickly as their lily-livered nieces and nephews ever did. There are some nice ones mixed in but who remembers them?
Jane Austen certainly had a flurry of memorable aunts floating around in her books, from the very, very bad (Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park or Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice) to the very good (Mrs Gardiner, an excellent source of motherly counsel for Elizabeth Bennet) to the undefinable (Miss Bates – doubtlessly a good woman but who doesn’t pity Jane Fairfax for having to deal with her tiresome fussings and rather vocal timidity?).
But that does put me in mind of Fay Weldon’s excellent Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen. If I could be the kind of aunt who dispenses sensible, non-binding advice while discoursing on Jane Austen I think I should be very happy indeed. We may need to wait a few years for that though. Until then, I will be content with cooing over her and buying obscene numbers of children’s books and looking forward to the day we can read them together.
The Captive Reader 
Your “bother”? Is he that difficult? Or were you keeping all the Rs (ah) for the new arrival? 🙂
He is a younger brother so yes, also occasionally a bother but now fixed (the spelling, not the bothersome nature of younger siblings)! Thanks for catching that.
Apparently the Aboriginal people had a tradition that when children became adolescents, a boy went to live with an uncle and a girl with her aunt to be taught men’s / women’s business. So keep a spare room available 😉 No really, congratulations! Aunts are SO important and special 🙂
A very interesting tradition! And particularly cunning on the part of the parents – who wouldn’t want to off load their obnoxious teenagers for a while?
Congratulations! I know just how exciting and lovely this feels. Being an aunt (nine times now) is the best job I’ve ever had, and being the “book aunt” is kind of wonderful too.
Nine! Wow, how fantastic to be part of such a large family – and to have so many people to buy books for.
Congratulations! I loved my aunts from my very emergence into this world and miss them still (though they could, at times, be bothersome:) ) and I do love being an aunt and a great aunt to scores of young ‘uns. Your post brings to mind the first book I read aloud to my grandmother who was just two months old when I read aloud to her from “Little Women”. At seven, she is now working her way through the Narnia series. I’d like to take credit, but, she has remarkable reading parents.
It is so exciting to think about sharing the books I love with my niece. Her mother and maternal grandmother are keen readers too, so she will definitely be surrounded by books all the time!
Become the “bookaunt”
I’m now Anne the bookaunt to 4 great-nephews, one great-niece and one great great nephew.
A question has been asked … “Does she own a bookstore?”
Bookaunt sounds good to me!
Congratulations on your new status 🙂 Even though Jane Austen created some ambiguous aunts, she strongly upheld the importance of aunts, and she seems to have been a wonderful one herself!
I have loved giving books to my nieces.
Yes, to be an aunt like Austen herself would be the best possible thing. I shall do my best to develop a satiric bent and excellent letter writing skills.
Lovely that you are now an aunt! I always like the picture Jane Austen gives of Jane Bennet gives of being so good with Aunt Gardiner’s children, and also Anne Elliot nursing little Charles: ‘You can always make little Charles do anything’. Then there’s that endearing scene with Emma and her little niece, making it up with Mr Knightley.
Was Aunt Norris based on anyone in real life?
I’m not sure if Mrs Norris was based on anyone but I certainly hope not!
What ho! May you never shape up like an Aunt Agatha. May you evolve along the lines of Aunt Dahlia, publishing a journal for which the young one, when he grows up, contribute some juicy pieces on what gentlemen are wearing. An Anatole would obviously help you to keep enticing him to your abode. You can then have the pleasure of forcing him to undertake such errands as stealing cats or sneering at silver cow creamers.