She recalled her past kindness -- the kindness, the affection of sixteen years ---

She recalled her past kindness — the kindness, the affection of sixteen years—- how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old — how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health — and how nursed her through the various illness of childhood (Jane Austen, Emma, 1815).

As writers and readers, we cleave to particular words, hoping they will work their magic and their mystery on us. Whenever I teach writing or literature I focus on particular words or phrases that seem to have a certain sort of force. Early on in her novel, Emma, Jane Austen uses the word ‘kindness’ to summarise the relationship between her heroine, Emma Woodhouse, and her former governess and friend, Miss Taylor. It is the first intimate relationship we encounter, and it sets the entire tone of the novel. Austen uses the word ‘kindness’ twice in the long sentence above. It is a sentence that structures an autobiography of affection, a history of kindness between Miss Taylor, who has recently gone off and married Mr. Weston, and Emma, at this point only sixteen.

Any student of literature, and indeed any writer, can get a grip on a character, a plot or a narrative history, by locating a writer’s particular vocabulary. We only have to notice their choice of words, their insistence on using particular words and phrases, often repeated. Austen is interested in affection, feelings; feelings that run the course of time. Kindness is a commitment, and Austen’s narrator reminds us that Miss Taylor’s kindness ran over the course of sixteen years and no doubt beyond; Emma begins with the end of one long stint of kindness. At this point in the novel, its opening sequence, Emma and her father are mourning the loss of Miss Taylor and her deep and enduring source of affection, Miss Taylor their friend.

I am drawn to this sentence, this moment, because of the doubling-up of kindness: ‘the kindness’ says Austen’s narrator, ‘the affection.’ The definite article (the) draws attention to the uniqueness of this history of kindness, for this is a history that is being explained: Emma’s childhood, swathed in kindness. Taking just this one sentence as a miniature biography of Emma’s childhood, I can understand a lot about what it means for Miss Taylor to remove herself from the Woodhouse home and go off with Mr. Weston to a new home.

The sentence unravels like a ribbon of practical care delivered over time: historic care. I notice the three uses of ‘how’: ‘how she had taught . . .how she had played . . . how she had devoted all her powers.’ This is a character sketch but it is also a clear statement of historical knowledge: the narrator knows how, in what precise ways Miss Taylor’s help was practical. The adverb ‘how’ functions as a hook for confirming knowledge of Miss Taylor’s defined acts of kindness, or what the narrator is now calling ‘devotion.’ Kindness has been defined or glossed, commented on, converted to a new but related idea. Kindness has been moved along.

All writers presenting characters as forms of argument (reasoning, developed thinking) must give us a sense of how their characters interact with other characters to provoke feelings; in this case, love and devotion over the course of years. This one sentence provides a summary of sixteen years of devoted care in which — if you do the maths — the three ‘how’s’ function as three parts of sixteen, which is five years plus one third. During these three sets of years, 5, 10, 15 and a bit, Miss Taylor amused her ward - Emma Woodhouse - and nursed her through various childhood illnesses. Such devotion was a strong form of emotional attachment (the verb ‘attach’ is there to remind me of this).

I have been reading Emma alongside another writer interested in kindness and care. Elizabeth Taylor was writing in the 20th century, but one of her literary ancestors was undoubtedly Jane Austen. Taylor’s novel, The Soul of Kindness, published in 1964, takes the theme of devoted affection, or kindness. ‘Kindness’, which if we look at the root of the word in a dictionary, reaches back to the old English word, ‘kyndnes’, which means ‘nation’ or ‘native’, but is also rooted in ‘kin’, which draws upon associations with ‘family’, or natural feeling for those you call your relations. Both Emma and The Soul of Kindness are novels of relations: how we are related to others and by what emotional and economic means.

Let’s take a sentence from The Soul of Kindness which involves another set of sustained feelings of affection and devotion.

At school, she had been Flora’s Nannie-friend, for it was clear from the day that Flora arrived there that what Mrs. Secretan had done — the cherishing, the protecting — could not be lightly broken off.

Now let me give you some sense of what is going on here. At the opening of the novel from which this sentence is taken, Flora Secretan is getting married. She is leaving behind her devoted mother, Mrs. Secretan, mentioned here, and she is being fussed over by her school friend, Meg Driscoll, her bridesmaid. As reader, we walk straight into a long history of fussing and petting, what Taylor’s narrator calls a ‘Nannie’ friendship. The Nanny is Mrs. Secretan, but it has also been Meg as we learn, because this sentence is told from Meg’s point of view. Meg inherited that devoted history of ‘cherishing' and ‘protecting’ Flora when Flora arrived at her new school. Meg, in other words, took on the work of adoring and protecting Flora; her work continues in this opening scene in her role as flapping, fussing bridesmaid (the scene also involves doves, an important symbol, so I am thinking carefully about my verb choice here; I’m seeing flapping birds).

Flora is a close relative of Emma Woodhouse who is also accustomed to exclusive care. There is something ominous about this sentence, and I hear it in the phrase, ‘what Mrs. Secretan had done’. What had she done, I wonder, and what will this mean for those who come into contact with Flora Secretan, about to become Flora Quartermaine? As a reader, I feel slightly nervous.

But this is what Taylor wants me to feel. The commitment to Flora is immense, and set against the backdrop of the wedding, Flora’s marriage to Richard Quartermaine, this sentence adds pressure to this commitment. Taylor implies that Mrs. Secretan had her own sort of marriage to her daughter, such was, and such is, the intensity of her feeling for Flora. This cherishing and protecting cannot be ‘lightly broken off;’ you might break off an engagement, but you cannot so easily break off a wedding day?

Taylor borrows from Austen’s vocabulary and plot, the language of emotional commitment to a child becoming woman: that long tract of time spent cherishing and protecting, which is the emotional inheritance of anyone who takes on the character and person of Flora Quartermaine or Emma Woodhouse. I feel doubly nervous.