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'''''Petunia Dursley''''', née Evans, is [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Characters/Harry Potter|Harry Potter]]'s aunt (she is [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Characters/Lily Potter|his mother's]] sister). She and her husband [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Characters/Vernon Dursley|Vernon Dursley]] reluctantly took Harry in as a baby, while they had their own son, [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Characters/Dudley Dursley|Dudley]]. Petunia dislikes Harry's magical abilities and wishes to "stamp it out of him," and partly as a result of this, relations between her and Harry have never been good.

It is hard to determine Petunia's actual feelings, if any, towards her husband, Vernon. It does seem that she discourages intimacy. One gets the feeling almost that Petunia has gotten married because that is what people do, rather than out of any particular affection for the man she is married to.

 

 

Petunia seems to be inordinately interested in what other people are doing, and thus, is extremely concerned with what other people think of her. Having accepted Harry into her house, reluctantly, we see that her rationale for keeping him there as he grows is that people would wonder what had gone wrong were he suddenly to disappear. Nearly everything that Petunia does is done to look good in the eyes of the neighbours, with the possible exceptions of her private treatment of Harry and her treatment of Dudley. We see this in particular at the start of ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'', where Harry is almost thrown out of the house before Petunia rationalizes the instructions she has received in terms of what the neighbours would think, and again at the end of that same book where she seems dismayed in particular by the unconventionality of Tonks' hair colour.

One thing which should be mentioned is the Howler delivered to Petunia at the beginning of ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix''. While we do eventually learn that this came from Dumbledore, we never hear any more about the circumstances. The fact that Dumbledore says "Remember my last [letter], Petunia," has been seen as proof that there has been ongoing correspondence between them, as if there had only been the one letter that had been left with Harry, the Howler would instead have said something like "Remember my letter". It is confirmed that Dumbledore had written to Petunia earlier — we find out in [[Muggles' Guide to Harry Potter/Books/Deathly Hallows/Chapter 33|''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'']] that Dumbledore had rejected her application to attend Hogwarts — but we are uncertain whether that and the letter left with Harry are the only two times Dumbledore has written to her, or whether there has been a trickle of correspondence over the years. Given the shock with which the Dursleys received Harry's first Hogwarts letter, one must suspect that there was little, if any, correspondence over the years, so the "last" to which Dumbledore referred in the Howler was most likely the letter that he had left with the infant Harry some fourteen years earlier. It is a safe assumption that Dumbledore had, in that letter, informed Petunia of the threat facing Harry should Voldemort return, and why Petunia was Harry's best hope of survival. Presumably, Petunia did not inform Vernon of the full details; if he knew them, Petunia would likely have mentioned them rather than talking about what the neighbours would think.

 

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