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MY ONLY regret about my children’s summer holiday, which will soon be over, is that they have not caught up with any of their cousins.

Both my parents had only one sibling, who emigrated — so what relationship I have with my first cousins is distant. My children are luckier: they have nine, all living in the UK.

I have always been intrigued by literary portraits of densely branched families, and novels where children grow up alongside their cousins. Fascinatingly, many of these novels are tethered to property.

Take Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Its first chapter describes events 30 years earlier: one sister marries a nobleman, another a clergyman offered a parish on the former’s estate, and the third a poor naval officer. Years later, when the latter asks her sisters for assistance, they decide that one of her daughters should come to them as a ward. And thus shy ten-year-old Fanny Price comes to Mansfield Park, to be brought up alongside her confident Bertram cousins. Despite it being continually reinforced that ‘she is not a Miss Bertram’, over time Fanny becomes indispensable to that household, even its moral arbiter.

Philip, the narrator of Daphne Du Maurier’s 19th-century-set thriller My Cousin Rachel, is the heir to the Cornish estate of his cousin Ambrose. While in Florence, Ambrose marries a distant cousin, Contessa Sangalletti. But when Ambrose dies, Philip becomes suspicious of foul play and his beguiling cousin. ‘Was Rachel innocent or guilty? Maybe I shall learn that, too, in purgatory?’

Tragedy also underpins Salley Vickers’s contemporary novel, Cousins, which opens with Hetta remembering the call that brought news of her brother Will’s cataclysmic climbing accident. By the time she and her parents reach Cambridge from their Northumbrian home, Dowlands, her cousin, Cele — closer to him than any sibling — is at Will’s bedside.

Marriage between cousins has, rightly, fallen out of favour, but enduring friendship has not. You are inextricably linked to a sibling, but with a cousin the bond feels more of your own making.