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The A-Z of aunts

Rupert Christiansen's The Complete Book of Aunts has just hit bookstores. His aunts fall roughly into these categories:

MONSTER AUNTS - In fiction these are everywhere: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, Aunt Norris in Mansfield Park, Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre, Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice, Aunts Selma and Patty in The Simpsons, Harry Potter’s ghastly Aunt Petunia, and James's aunts Spiker and Sponge, despatched by the Giant Peach who rolls them flat. We love reading about monster aunts. (The Baroness de Stempel was a real-life monster niece who defrauded her kind Aunt Puss of her fortune and placed it in 49 fraudulent bank accounts. Aunt Puss, who died penniless and alone, had gold bars worth £12,000,000 in 1990, not recovered to this day.)

DOTTY AUNTS - The most famous is probably Aunt Ada Doom in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, who saw "something nasty in the woodshed". (I’m keen on Russell Hoban's character Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who wears an iron hat. Flowers wilt as she passes by. Nephew Tom advertises for a new aunt and gets the lovely Miss Bundlejoy Cosysweet.) As Christiansen found, there are many dotty aunts in real life: Etty, the eldest daughter of Charles Darwin, sent down to the cook to ask her to count the prune stones left on her plate – whether there were three or four – and wore a home-made gas mask of a kitchen strainer stuffed with cotton wool; Rachel Townsend's Aunt Em lived in Belgravia, always travelled with seven umbrellas, wore a Cossack hat that once belonged to Rudolph Valentino, made a point of attending the weddings of complete strangers and being rude about the wedding outfits. She died penniless, having given away all her money; the writer Norman Lewis’s Aunts Li, Annie and Polly met once a week on Saturday mornings at 10am to feed a home-made fruit cake to the jackdaws in the garden.

SEXY AUNTS - These tend to crop up in foreign literature. In La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, Gina falls in love with her nephew Fabrice del Dongo with, for her, disastrous consequences. An aunt behaves badly in Apollinaire’s pornographic novel Forbidden Fruit. "In case you're wondering," Christiansen said, "Apollinaire didn’t have an aunt."

BRAVE AUNTS - Aunt Dot in Rose Macaulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, who sets off from Istanbul on a camel to convert Muslim Turks to Anglicanism; Graham Greene’s Aunt Augusta in Travels With My Aunt, who decides her nephew Henry needs the stuffing knocked out of him and takes him on a smuggling trip on the Orient Express. (I should like to nominate Aunt Glegg, the only person to stand by the disgraced Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.)

THE JEALOUS AUNT - Virginia Woolf, a very good aunt in other ways, did not want her nephew Julian to be a writer. "I don't see why you should worry yourself to write a novel."

THE CARELESS AUNT - Lucy's aunt in Edward Ardizzone's Lucy Brown and Mr Grimes. Lucy, walking alone in the park, meets a dear old man called Mr Grimes who invites her to tea. She has a lovely time talking to him and eventually he writes to her aunt to ask if he can adopt her and take her to live with him in the country. The aunt agrees and off Lucy goes with Mr Grimes. Enough said.

THE MODERN AUNT - In his book Christiansen doesn't tell us her real name. She donates an egg which is fertilised by her barren sister's husband and implanted in her sister. Thus she becomes both aunt and mother to the child.

FAVOURITE AUNT - "Jane Austen," said Christiansen without a moment's thought, “is my dream aunt. Physically active, loved running round, incredibly good fun, gave good, realistic, principled advice to her niece Fanny. Imagine what fun it would have been to go to an unsuitable play with Aunt Jane. She was a bit of a bitch. Her sister Cassandra destroyed nine-tenths of her correspondence and when you read the remaining tenth you see why."

Aunts have rather had it in the early 21st century. There are still Agony Aunts (some of them male), who date from the mid-18th century, and spanking aunts on the internet and Universal Aunts, going stronger than ever. "So genteel," said Christiansen, "when you ring them up on the telephone. But nowadays you don't call anybody Aunt So-and-So. I'm an uncle and I couldn't bear to be called Uncle. It's the end of an era – that's why I wanted to write this book. For 200 years aunts have had a hold on Western imagination, but no longer. Grandparents are living longer and have moved into this position, helping out with their children's children, while unmarried aunts are busy doing things like running merchant banks."

But there will always be auntly aunts and he has tips for them.

l. Break the rules. I have nephews and godchildren. I had this great ongoing story with one of them about Aunt Pongo; it was all about poo and wee and farting and belching and he adored it.

2. Get them away from their parents. Take them somewhere they haven't been before, like up in a balloon.

3. Assume they are slightly older than they are and listen to them without interruption.

4. Don't try to be funny. Your idea of a joke won't be theirs.

5. And please don't tell them how they've grown.

* The Complete Book of Aunts is published by Faber & Faber on October 5, at £12.99.

This article was created: 18 October 2006.
This article was last edited: 15 February 2007.

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