Top 10 cousins in fiction | Books

In Saul Bellow’s short story Cousins, the narrator recalls a formative episode from his 1920s Chicago schooldays: “We were issued a series of booklets: ‘Our Little Japanese Cousins’, ‘Our Little Moroccan Cousins’, ‘Our Little Russian Cousins’, ‘Our Little Spanish Cousins.’ I read all these gentle descriptions about little Ivan and tiny Conchita and my eager heart opened to them. Why, we were close, we were one under it all …” Here, the schoolteacher is of course using “cousins” as old-fashioned racist shorthand for the other; people who might seem alien at first, but with whom you must learn to get along. Related, but different, somehow.

This is largely how cousins have been presented in fiction over the centuries: tied by blood, but perhaps very different in terms of culture and experience. Further sub-categories emerged in the 19th century: the cruel and exploitative cousin, the kind and benign variety, the poor relation, or even the cousin who turns up with an inheritance and saves a family’s finances; a deus ex machina that gets the writer off the hook.

In my own novel Jacob’s Advice, the English cousins who find themselves in Paris fall into none of these niches. They are less close than brothers, more like affectionately adversarial friends. But in many ways, cousins are a novelist’s dream: characters who are simultaneously close yet distant, and always on hand to tie up a tricky loose end.

1. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The archetypal poor relation, Austen’s heroine Fanny Price has often been criticised for being tediously virtuous and less than proactive in getting her man. But get him she does in this sparkling comedy of manners and family politics. When impoverished Fanny is sent, aged 10, to the country pile of her uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, only her cousin Edmund treats her with anything approaching respect. When she comes of age, meretricious Mary draws Edmund away, while her brother Henry performs the same dazzling trick on Fanny. This being Austen, the marriage plot has to be fulfilled, and we finish the novel convinced that Fanny will have a happier future than all of Austen’s heroines put together.

2. Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons by Honoré de Balzac
Balzac subtitled his two novels – written almost simultaneously between 1846 and 47 – Poor Relations, and they were conceived as two sides of the same coin: the malicious cousin versus the virtuous cousin. With the action taking place in Paris from the 1830s onwards, Balzac offers two antithetical views of human nature. The “desiccated spinster” Bette is intent on destroying the Hulot family on whose wealth she is dependent; while “delicate-souled” Pons is a benign old man scorned by his bourgeois “betters”, leading ultimately to tragedy. The great French novelist’s high naturalism and psychological penetration ensures we don’t interpret either cousin’s behaviour as wholly good or bad.

3. Cousin Phillis by Elizabeth Gaskell
A “novelette”, as novellas were known in the mid-19th century, Cousin Phillis is one of Gaskell’s most quietly accomplished works. When 19-year-old narrator Paul Manning leaves home and finds himself lodgings in the fictional Cheshire town of Eltham, he becomes aware he has a cousin living nearby: Phillis Green, “something of an heiress” after inheriting her father’s estate. Paul soon discovers this “stately, gracious young woman” of 17 is independent minded with ambitions of her own. A tale of first love remembered, Cousin Phillis begins as a bildungsroman, but becomes more a meditation on the relentless passing of time.

4. My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
Small hands, big plans. Du Maurier’s Rachel – whose “narrow and small and very white” hands seem so at odds with her murderous designs – is a fiendishly worldly and carnal creation; a black widow luring men into her web only to destroy them. When Philip is orphaned as a baby, he’s taken in by his older, benevolent cousin Ambrose. As Philip becomes a young man, Ambrose makes regular trips to Florence for his health, where he marries their cousin Rachel – then falls mysteriously ill and dies. It is left to Philip to deal with the slippery Rachel, and the tricky question of inheritence. A page-turning thriller filled with subtle symbolism and sexual yearning.

5. The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
A five-book saga following the fortunes of the upper middle-class Cazelet clan before, during and after the second world war, Howard’s supreme achievement is a web of cousin relationships. From the first novel, The Light Years, to the last, All Change, we’re invested in the tangled aspirations of the Cazelet children, while also seeing their world from the outside. A rambling, immersive picture of a generation as it grows to maturity.

6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Another cousin novel with war as its backdrop, How I Live Now is a model of simplicity in comparison to the Cazelets’ byzantine adventures. Daisy is 15 when her father sends her away to live with her four cousins in their extensive country residence. When she falls in love with her cousin Edmond (perhaps an allusion to Austen’s novel) and his “quizzical wise-dog gaze”, she’s forced to negotiate adult emotions for the first time. An engaging debut novel with YA appeal.

7. The Emperor’s Children by Clare Messud
Marina, Danielle and Julius are wealthy Manhattanite thirtysomethings, creatives and friends. When Marina’s young cousin Bootie arrives from a bland New York suburb, he’s intent on disrupting their complacent lives. A college dropout, Dostoyevskyan malcontent and wannabe philosopher, Bootie becomes amanuensis to Marina’s father, a legendary journalist. When Bootie takes against the great man in the run-up to 9/11, he proves his favourite quotation from Emerson correct: “Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them.”

8. Cousins by Salley Vickers
There are more than one set of cousins in Vickers’ populous family saga. First cousins Fred and Betsy, who have an unusually close relationship that began when they were small, are juxtaposed with Will and Cele, also passionately close cousins, but of a different generation. When Will falls from the spire of King’s College, Cambridge, during a night-climbing accident, Cele has to deal with the consequences for the whole family. A former psychotherapist, Vickers nails the unspoken bonds and tensions between cousins perfectly.

9. Two Cousins of Azov by Andrea Bennett
A delightful, gently ludic novel about ageing that’s fizzing with comic life. Set in post-Soviet 90s Russia, it’s the story of Gor and his estranged Armenian cousin, Tolya, with whom he grew up. We meet Gor in the early stages of dementia – “old age had him by the scruff” – when he discovers that Tolya is still alive, in a Rostov sanatorium. The book is about how they each find their only living relative again.

10. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
One of the more memorable plot strands in this update of Don Quixote concerns the relationship between Quichotte, an Indian pharmaceutical travelling salesman, and Dr Smile, his wealthy cousin who owns the company he works for. Quichotte is put out to pasture by Dr Smile, which acts as a catalyst for his picaresque and romantic adventures, reminding him that being the poor relation is not always the worst position to hold in the family pecking order.