a random question

[fox]

This has occurred to me before, and I bet someone around here knows the answer.

Dahlia Travers and Agatha Gregson: sisters, or not? (Uncle Wiki says they're sisters, but doesn't give a specific citation. So how do we know this? The fact that they share a nephew is not, obvs., sufficient; my nephew has two aunts and we are no relation to each other - not even sisters-in-law, in fact.)

Comments

[resonant]

Huh! Good question. I always assumed they were sisters. If they're not, it's a terrible waste of many possibilities for sibling rivalry when they were younger.

[coyotegestalt]

Clearly, a reread is in order!

[lakester.livejournal.com]

They are, and also sisters of Bertie's late father.

It probably crops up elsewhere but a couple of quotes from Much obliged, Jeeves

'I never see this relative without thinking how odd it is that one sister – call her Sister A – can be so unlike another sister, whom we will call Sister B. My Aunt Agatha, for instance, is tall and thin and looks rather like a vulture in the Gobi desert, while Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, like a scrum half in the game of Rugby football. In disposition, too, they differ widely. Aunt Agatha is cold and haughty, though presumably unbending a bit when conducting human sacrifices at the time of the full moon, as she is widely rumoured to do, and her attitude towards me has always been that of an austere governess, causing me to feel as if I were six years old and she had just caught me stealing jam from the jam cupboard; whereas Aunt Dahlia is as jovial and bonhomous as a pantomime dame in a Christmas pantomime. Curious.'

And also -

'For perhaps a quarter of a minute after I had rejoined the human herd, as represented by my late father's sister Dahlia, I wasn't able to get a word in, the old ancestor being fully occupied with saying what she thought of the compiler of the Observer crossword puzzle, with particular reference to domes and pedometers.'

[fox]

Thank you! I knew someone would come along with chapter and verse. :-)

I think I had the sense that Aunt Dahlia was Bertie's father's sister - he talks from time to time about her sense of the Wooster clannish spirit - but I couldn't be sure that Aunt Agatha wasn't his mother's sister. But I knew there must be a way to be sure.

[antisoppist]

I am glad someone had the answer. I wandered by on Network yesterday and it has been bothering me ever since. I thought they must at least be "blood aunts" [1] as aunts by marriage could never be that possessively interfering.

[1] My mother was once asked ghoulishly "are you a blood aunt"? by a wide-eyed small child at a wedding and it has had vampire-like connotations in our family ever since.