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Part two: the A-Z of aunts

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Living with mother

The rise and rise of daughters

Looking after grandchildren

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The age of the aunt

Aunts as we know them are a relatively new phenomenon – Rupert Christiansen was so fascinated by the niche they occupy in life and in literature that he has devoted a book to them. Maureen Cleave reports

It was the death of his Aunt Janet three years ago that persuaded Rupert Christiansen to write a book about aunts. He'd loved her very much. He was lunching with friends a few days later and talking about her, when their small son piped up, "Why are there aunts?" "I thought – that's a good question," and so he came to write The Complete Book of Aunts.

So why are there aunts? There are none in the animal world – if a mother elephant dies, all the female elephants rally round. There are none in classical mythology, and none in the Bible, though the Table of Affinity does forbid you to marry them, and it's possible that Salome, the wife of Zebedee and mother of James and John, was the Virgin Mary's sister and therefore Jesus's aunt.

Many languages don't even have a word for aunt. The earliest mention Christiansen could find was Nero's great aunt, Domitia. In AD54, poor Aunt Domitia was in bed with severe constipation. Nero, true to form, ordered the doctors to give her a very strong laxative that killed her off, whereupon he seized all her possessions.

"Then," said Christiansen, "you hear almost nothing about aunts until the mid-18th century." We were sitting on his balcony overlooking a pretty garden in south London, drinking tea and eating squidgy cake. He is 52, opera critic for the Daily Telegraph and dance critic for the Mail on Sunday, and has lived with newspapers from birth. His grandfather, Arthur, edited the Daily Express for 30 years and his father, Michael, the Sunday Mirror for 10.

Everybody, it seems, has a story about an aunt. There are so many that he began to wonder whether he shouldn't call the book The Incomplete Book of Aunts. "Children are fascinated by aunts. You sense this blood relationship but don't quite understand it. But the original meaning of Aunt was probably more akin to 'Auntie' – a nice old lady you knew. In my childhood in a respectable middle-class London suburb, there were one or two lady friends of my mother's, and you couldn't just call them Elsie or whatever – you called them Auntie Elsie.

"People suddenly get interested in aunts in the mid-18th century. Capitalism gave rise to many small businesses. People left parental homes to live elsewhere. Marriage was a much more open matter. Women often needed someone to talk to who was not their mother, like Elizabeth Bennet's sensible Aunt Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice. There's a lack of baggage with the aunt, and they have emotion to dispose of. What I find odd is that, while we have an adjective for uncle, 'avuncular', we have no adjective for aunt." Sometimes he resorts to "auntly".
Spinster aunts are the most useful. He said that when mothers died young, as they often did, aunts took over: the Brontës' poor Aunt Branwell, for instance. "She didn't want to look after them; it meant the end of her life, and she sat upstairs in that awful cold vicarage in Yorkshire, a grumpy old thing. Nobody liked her."

John Lennon's Aunt Mimi is a modern example of the aunt stepping in. "The fascinating thing about Aunt Mimi is that she became John's mother while his mother Julia became his aunt. They swapped roles. She did the washing and the cooking and brought him up by hand. Once a month Julia would see him and they would have a lovely day out. Mimi and Mummy – he muddled the names as a child.

Mimi adored him in this abject, painful way, although his Liverpudlian accent appalled her. She bought him a classy guitar for £l4 with the warning, "The guitar's all right as a hobby, John, but you'll never make a living out of it." When he was made an MBE he pinned it to her chest, saying she deserved it more than he did. And when he was killed, she cut all her hair off - poor old Aunt Mimi."

As the 19th century advanced, he said, there were aunts all over the place. Maiden aunts, free of husbands, moved into the professions and public life, often giving nieces a leg-up. Lilian Baylis began working for her Aunt Emma Cons at the Old Vic for £1 a week, and went on to lay the foundations of the National Theatre, the English National Opera and the Royal Ballet. Because authors love orphans – Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Heidi, Tom Sawyer – there was a huge increase in fictional aunts (fictional orphans – for instance, Harry Potter – survive to this day).

With the expansion of the Empire, parents set off for distant lands, farming their children out to aunts, sometimes not seeing them for years. This happened to Saki (Hector Munro), PG Wodehouse and Kipling. Wodehouse endured aunts Julie, Nim, Mary, Loulie, Anne, Lydia, Edith, Constance, Alice, Jane and Amy. His alter ego, Bertie Wooster, has an Aunt Agatha who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth. He says to Jeeves: "If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don't they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?"

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

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