In a curious case of art imitating life (or vice versa), aunts are a big part of my literary and personal life right now. It was nearly three years ago that I first had the idea to write the story of Dorothy’s aunt Em from The Wizard of Oz. I wonder if my fascination with exploring Aunt Em’s backstory comes from the five fabulous aunties and a significant great-aunt who have been such a big part of my life.
My sister and I were particularly close to my mum’s three sisters. Family gatherings at Christmas and Easter were held, in rotation, at one of the sister’s houses. There was always too much food, plenty of laughter and more than a touch of chaos. Auntie Margaret’s homemade scotch eggs became the stuff of legend. Auntie Dallas’s trifle got bigger and boozier each year (she was named after an American GI from Dallas who lived in the village during the war – I knew you were wondering). When everyone had stuffed themselves at the buffet tea, the aunties set to washing and drying the dishes and wrapping up leftovers with terrifying efficiency. The pride in hosting was so great that we arrived to my aunt’s house in Hull one St Stephen’s Day to be told that my uncle had suffered a stroke that morning. She didn’t want to cancel, so on the show went! Yorkshire women are made of strong stuff and none more so than four sisters raised by their mother, grandmother and several “aunties” after their father left them.
Relationships with our aunts can be as significant as our relationships with our mothers. In some cases, even more so. Many of us become aunts before we become mothers, learning how to hold and mind a baby, before gladly returning them to their parents. Many women I know who aren’t mothers absolutely treasure their role of auntie, finding seemingly endless ways to corrupt their nieces and nephews. And we all have women in our lives who aren’t technically our aunties, but who have always been there for us.
In Little Women, Aunt March is a rich widow who disapproves of Marmee’s parenting, yet ultimately has a lasting influence on two of her great-nieces
When my mum died at the age of 48, it was her sisters – our aunts – who stepped up to try to fill the void she’d left behind. I still get birthday and Christmas cards from the two surviving aunties and, yes, there’s always a bit of money tucked inside (I’m 54!). In recent months, I’ve seen my aunties more often as I make regular trips from Kildare back to Yorkshire to visit my elderly dad. Only last month, I spent the night at my auntie’s. I slept in my cousin’s old bedroom, where I’d once played Scalextric and Subbuteo with him. Core memories unlocked and held tight.
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Several fictional aunties have also stayed with me. From the kind and caring to the strict and unlikeable, literary aunts are often childless, unmarried or widowed. They can lend a delicious sense of unconventionality to a novel. Jane Austen (herself an aunt) gave us several memorable aunts, not least in Pride and Prejudice with Lizzie Bennet’s Aunt Gardiner, and Darcy’s aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, a woman with all the worst traits of the stereotypical awful auntie.
In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens gives us the marvellous Betsey Trotwood, the classic hardened Victorian widow and yet a woman who cares deeply for her nephew. In Oliver Twist, Rose Maylie, the young woman who cares for young Oliver when he is sick, is later revealed to be his aunt. In Little Women, Aunt March is a rich widow who disapproves of Marmee’s parenting, yet ultimately has a lasting influence on two of her great-nieces. Paddington’s Aunt Lucy also deserves an honourable mention as the little bear’s north star and his connection to home.
Significantly less loveable are Roald Dahl’s terrible Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker in James and the Giant Peach; aunts with no redeeming features at all who are eventually crushed to death by the enormous fruit, much to the delight of young readers. JK Rowling gives Harry Potter a particularly horrible aunt/wicked stepmother in Aunt Petunia, and who wasn’t traumatised by Jane Eyre’s experiences in the red room, sent there by her Aunt Reed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Whether fictional women who raised some of our most beloved literary nieces and nephews, or those in our real lives who have helped to raise us, here’s to the aunties
But one literary aunt who often gets overlooked is L Frank Baum’s Aunt Em from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Left behind in Kansas while Dorothy sets off on her adventures along the Yellow Brick Road, it isn’t surprising that Em isn’t as prominent as other literary aunts, yet she is pivotal in Dorothy’s longing to return home. Most of us know Aunt Em from the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland, with Clara Blandick playing the role of Dorothy’s rather stern and brusque aunt. But it was from Baum’s original book that I discovered a tantalising hint of a different woman. “When Aunt Em came there to live, she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too... She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now.”
In imagining what had happened to change her so dramatically, I saw Emily as a hopeful young woman - the daughter of Irish immigrants - embarking on a new life as a farmer’s wife on the Kansas prairies when tragedy strikes and she takes in her orphaned niece. Aunt Em’s love for Dorothy is evident in the final - short - chapter of the book when Dorothy returns home: “‘My darling child,’ she cried, folding the little girl in her arms and covering her face with kisses; ‘where in the world did you come from?’”
Whether fictional women who raised some of our most beloved literary nieces and nephews, or those in our real lives who have helped to raise us, here’s to the aunties. You matter more than you’ll ever know.
Hazel Gaynor is the author of The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter. Her latest book, Before Dorothy, will be published by HarperCollins on June 19th
