Wodehouse spent much of his youth with his many aunts and uncles, as his parents were generally away in Hong Kong.
[2] She is "a large, genial soul", and Bertie praises "her humanity, sporting qualities, and general good-eggishness".
[3] Though typically friendly, she is capable, with effort, of going into an authoritative "grande dame act" if the situation calls for it, assuming a serious expression and cold, aristocratic tone.
[5] Described as being built along the lines of Mae West, Aunt Dahlia is short and solid, with a reddish complexion.
Riding in her youth for years with such fox-hunting packs as the Quorn and the Pytchley, she tends to address Bertie, over the phone or indoors, as if "shouting across ploughed fields in a high wind.
"[14] Dahlia employs the French chef Anatole, whose cooking is revered by many characters, especially her husband Tom and her nephew Bertie Wooster.
Before Seppings, Aunt Dahlia employed a butler named Pomeroy, a noble fellow, and before him, Murgatroyd, who turned out to be a thief.
[17] In "Clustering Round Young Bingo", Aunt Dahlia hires the incomparable chef Anatole.
As a Governor of Market Snodsbury Grammar School, she asks Bertie in Right Ho, Jeeves to award prizes and give a speech at the school, though Bertie pushes this task onto Gussie Fink-Nottle, whom Aunt Dahlia always calls "Spink-Bottle".
In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, she temporarily pawns her pearl necklace to buy a serial from Daphne Dolores Morehead to help sell the Milady's Boudoir to the newspaper magnate Mr. Trotter.
In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, she tells Bertie about how Sir Watkyn Bassett bragged about obtaining a black amber statuette.
In "Jeeves and the Greasy Bird", a story that takes place before the sale of Milady's Boudoir, the writer Blair Eggleston writes for the magazine, and Aunt Dahlia and Jeeves save Bertie from the underhanded theatrical agent Jas Waterbury.
She last appears in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, in which she places a bet on a horse, and intends to ensure that her wager is successful with a plan that involves kidnapping a cat.
Though Bertie thinks highly of his Aunt Dahlia, he decides that her moral code is not as strict as his.
[20] Dahlia's telegram conversations with Bertie can display some rough love; for instance, in Right Ho, Jeeves, after Bertie dumped his prize-giving duty on an unsuspecting Gussie Fink-Nottle and sent him to Brinkley Court, she sent: « Am taking legal advice to ascertain whether strangling an idiot nephew counts as murder.
In the following novel Jeeves in the Offing, the magazine "had recently been sold to a mug up Liverpool way", and Dahlia mentions that there was a short story in each issue, adding that "in seventy per cent of those short stories the hero won the heroine's heart by saving her dog or her cat or whatever foul animal she happened to possess.