This assumes a broadly kind view of human nature: that aunts and nieces can live and love each other like mother and daughter, that all of the same assumptions can apply including taking each other for granted from time to time.

While we were watching the movie the first time, my wife, who hadn't seen the film dozens of times like I had, suddenly exclaimed: "Dorothy is an orphan, I never realized that." While technically we can assume that she is, since she lives with her aunt and uncle and no mention is made of her parents, the word "orphan" didn't sit right with me. I said, "No - she has her aunt and uncle," which actually has nothing to do with orphanhood. But what I really meant is that her aunt and uncle ARE her parents, and I think of orphans as not having parents.

The new L. Frank Baum biography by Katharine M. Rogers confirms that Baum was a very kind man and devoted father:

He appears to have been one of the very few writers who really were exactly as one would want them to be: sweet-natured, kind, a loving husband and father. He was also reasonable and liberal, with a sardonic sense of humor that prevented his books from ever becoming cloying. [NY Times]

He was, Rogers writes, ''a secure man who did not worry about asserting his masculine authority,'' and he was not bothered that Maud had the upper hand in the marriage; in fact he seemed to welcome her take-charge attitude. His feminist beliefs would have a profound effect on his fiction. Nearly all of his child heroes were girls, girls who rely on their own resources and not on the aid, or validation, of men. He thought men who did not support feminist aspirations ''selfish, opinionated, conceited or unjust — and perhaps all four combined,'' as he wrote in a newspaper editorial. ''The tender husband, the considerate father, the loving brother, will be found invariably championing the cause of women.''

For J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, losing his parents is the defining tragedy of his life; for Baum's Dorothy, the tragedy isn't even mentioned because Uncle Henry and Auntie Em have so completely assumed parental roles and got on with their lives. Harry's aunt and uncle can't imagine loving Harry like a son; Dorothy's aunt and uncle can't imagine not loving her like a daughter. Would that every orphan's life was like Dorothy's: all children deserved to be so loved that they can take it for granted.