Letizia Caterina

Letitia Ketterley, known as Aunt Letty and Miss Ketterley, is the firm, practical adult who keeps order in the household where Digory lives with Uncle Andrew. She helps make the house’s hidden danger legible to Digory: Andrew is barred from speaking freely, his upstairs study is forbidden, and the warnings surrounding him point toward a mystery. When that mystery breaks into the drawing room in the form of Jadis, Aunt Letty’s brisk authority meets a threat it cannot simply command away. Yet she rises from the encounter quickly and resumes control of the household, including the care of Digory’s sick mother.

Household Authority and Andrew’s Secrets

Aunt Letty’s control of the household is apparent in the rules Digory describes to Polly. Andrew has a study on the top floor, but Aunt Letty says Digory must never go there. At meals, whenever Andrew tries to tell Digory something, she cuts him off, telling him not to worry the boy or redirecting Digory toward playing in the garden. She does not let Andrew get far enough for Digory to learn what he means to say. The child is therefore protected from information, but the repeated interruption also sharpens his suspicion: the prohibition and the silencing make the concealed matter seem more, not less, important.

That domestic censorship has a practical history. When Andrew asks Aunt Letty for five pounds, she refuses without looking up from the mattress she is mending, reminding him that she has told him repeatedly she will not lend him money. When he presses her and calls her troublesome, she looks him in the face and asks whether he is ashamed to ask. The narrator explains the grievance behind her rebuke: Andrew had managed her business affairs, never done any work, and run up large bills for brandy and cigars that she paid again and again. His conduct had left her considerably poorer than she had been thirty years earlier. Her refusal is not a passing display of severity but a boundary set after a long pattern of financial exploitation.

The Witch in the Drawing Room

Aunt Letty’s self-possession is tested when Andrew brings Jadis into the house. Seeing the Witch, she demands to know who the young woman is; Andrew stammers that she is a distinguished foreigner and a very important person. Aunt Letty dismisses his explanation as rubbish and orders Jadis out, threatening to send for the police. She mistakes Jadis for someone from a circus and disapproves of her bare arms, a mundane interpretation that collides with the Witch’s supernatural power.

Jadis responds by demanding that Aunt Letty kneel and threatening to blast her. Aunt Letty answers with a rule of ordinary domestic propriety: there is to be no strong language in the house. The exchange makes the mismatch plain. Aunt Letty tries to contain the intrusion through familiar authority—identifying a disruptive visitor, ordering her out, and invoking the police—while Jadis speaks as a ruler who expects submission. Aunt Letty does not recognize the danger’s true nature, but she does not welcome or defer to it.

Recovery, Care, and Character

The confrontation ends with Aunt Letty knocked down. Her fall could have broken all her bones had she landed on the bare boards or even on the carpet; by good luck, she lands on the mattress she had been mending. The cushioning object from the earlier scene becomes crucial to the aftermath. Aunt Letty is a tough old lady: after taking sal volatile and sitting still for a few minutes, she says she has only a few bruises.

Her recovery is also a return to responsibility. She soon takes charge, sending the housemaid Sarah to the police station to report a dangerous lunatic at large. At the same time, she says she will take lunch upstairs to Mrs. Kirke, Digory’s mother. The sequence establishes her competence through action rather than explanation: even after a frightening fall, she handles the public danger and continues the household’s care for a seriously ill person. Digory and Aunt Letty eat their own lunch only after his mother’s has been taken care of; afterward, Digory does some hard thinking.

Narrative Role

Aunt Letty anchors the extraordinary events in the ordinary management of a London home. Mending a mattress, refusing an unwanted loan, enforcing manners, summoning the police, and carrying lunch upstairs all belong to the same practical world. That world cannot prevent Jadis from entering or overcome her power, but it supplies the terms in which the intrusion first appears: an unexplained visitor, an insult to the household, and a threat that calls for the authorities.

Her role also clarifies the cost of Andrew’s secrecy. By shutting down his attempts to speak to Digory, Aunt Letty keeps the boy away from whatever Andrew might disclose, while her prohibition against the attic reinforces his sense that something is wrong. The narrative does not establish that she knows the source of Andrew’s secrets. Instead, it presents her as an authority acting on the domestic facts available to her: Andrew’s evasiveness, his financial irresponsibility, and the sudden arrival of a stranger. When those facts give way to danger, her instinct remains to protect the household and care for its vulnerable members.