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 