Great-Aunts

 

Did your parents know the origins

of your names, or their associations?

Wendy, invented for a story

two decades before you were born;

Joyce, also a surname, often Irish

like your own. Your sister Rose

must have been called after the flower,

for she was never Rosemary, a herb

nothing to do with roses.

Kay perhaps because your mother

was Catherine, though spelt with a C.

Shirley Williams was not the first woman

to be named after Charlotte Brontë's

least known heroine, for so were

Bassey, Temple and all your namesakes.

Do any of you know that before that

it was a man's name? Your father

never read fiction, especially not written

by a woman; your mother discovered

Brontë in her eighties, bought Jane Eyre

one day from Dillon's in Exeter, picked it up

that night and couldn’t put it down.