Aunt Dahlia: Encyclopedia - Aunt Dahlia

Aunt Dahlia

Dahlia Travers, née Wooster, is a fictional character in the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. She is best known as Bertie Wooster's bonhomous, red-faced Aunt Dahlia; she is much beloved by her nephew, in contrast with her sister, Bertie's Aunt Agatha. She is married to Tom Travers and employs the supremely gifted French chef Anatole.

Unlike Aunt Agatha, this aged relative seems to enjoy Bertie's company and occasionally shows him an aunt's love, even if she does call him a "young blot." Sometimes, Bertie suspects, Dahlia seems to value him more for his association with the exceptionally brainy Jeeves than for his own qualities. Her chief use for Bertie, however, is to commit minor burglaries or acts of calculated vandalism, which often misfire and require Jeeves to extract them both from the soup.

Her most notable personal characteristic is her carrying voice. Riding as she did for years with the Quorn and the Pytchley, she can emit a yelp that can be heard in the next county.

She was for many years the proprietor of a weekly newspaper for women, Milady's Boudoir, which never sold well and only stayed in business because of the reluctant largesse of Dahlia's husband, who referred to the paper as "Madame's Nightshirt." Bertie once contributed an article to it titled "What the well-dressed man is wearing".

Dahlia and Tom Travers make their residence at Brinkley Court outside Market Snodsbury in Worcestershire.

The only data Wodehouse gives as to the date of the couple's wedding is "the year Bluebottle won the Cambridgeshire."

She appears in very many of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, notably among them:

• Right Ho, Jeeves
• Much Obliged, Jeeves

Category: P. G. Wodehouse characters

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Aunt Dahlia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki