There were several answers to the query about
aunts and orphans.
SES mentioned Jane Eyre ( raised by her heartless
Aunt Reed) and David Copperfield( his kind, eccentric aunt Betsy Trotwood
) and Pollyanna (1913) -- "but Jane, David, and Tom [Sawyer] are
probably the best examples."
Wikipedia informed me that Dickens' aunt Betsy was a
favourite among various writers and that James Joyce parodied her in
"Ulysses".
In my own experience as a "foreigner" to British and American
culture, while studying for my Cambrige Certificate of Proficiency in English,
in its earliest stages when I was twelve or so, I had to read an
abridged(!) version of exactly those two novels: "David Copperfield" and "Jane
Eyre." I cannot even imagine that Nabokov, who'd been raised by French and
English nannies, would have also begun his early reading experience in
English using these abridged texts ( the third one was "A Tale of Two
Cities")
On another issue, concerning VN's studies at Cambrige.
No one remembered to include Nabokov's reference to "family jewels" that were
sold to pave his and his brothers studies after they fled from Russia. I
only vaguely recollect they were set down somewhere in SM.
Returning to Charles Darwin's accessment that
"Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready
for action, and is as immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the
works of Nature are to those of Art." ( which I compared to Hegel's, on the
same issue).
I only recently realized that many of the
avant-garde tendencies which put so much emphasis on the artist's ability to
create his characters ab nihilo ( refusing tradition and other
heritages) were, indirectly, refusing evolutionism and favouring...
creationism!
Metaphorically, at least, also VN seems to
have belonged to the group of "literary
creationists"...