And so it began: and so it begins...

Below, is the first collaborative writing project I did with Sally. I was about seventeen, in grade eleven, trudging through university applications. I was very new to the world of literary writing and criticism – I didn’t even know that ‘humanities research’ existed.

In my writing today, the framework of Elizabeth Taylor’s stories have become symbols – of plots and characters. Taylor puppets dynamic trios, that place an emotion, feeling, or mood under interrogation. Yesterday, I was trying to create a dynamic composition of my characters by understanding their relationships and proximities: balance is struck much like a visual composition. There is lots of loneliness in The Soul of Kindness; but, as Taylor shows, loneliness does not mean empty space or plain isolation. Loneliness is a kind of wall: what enters and exists is only more purposeful and disruptive – more consequential.

I am posting this work as the first article on this space as a chronological marker of where the collaborative process began in print and publication. This writing was a turning point for me, in understanding the structure of stories, and so, the structure of my own writing.

Elizabeth Taylor

By Sally Bayley

“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 she nursed her through the various illness of childhood.” (Jane Austen, Emma, 1815).

 I have recently been teaching some of Jane Austen’s novels alongside those of the lesser-known twentieth-century writer, Elizabeth Taylor. They share several affinities, not least their interest in subtle forms of shifting emotion and psychological nuance; discreet social and emotional implications: a language of hints. I often read their sentences twice, three times, because some sentences can deliver more than we thought they might; entire histories.

Austen was interested in affection, feelings; feelings that run the course of time. Kindness is a commitment, and in the passage above 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. 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.’ The adverb ‘how’ functions as a hook for confirming knowledge of Miss Taylor’s carefully 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. Devotion is an act of sincere and felt committed. Kindness has been moved along.

Elizabeth Taylor was also a writer interested in kindness and care. She was writing in the twentieth century, but one of her literary ancestors was undoubtedly Austen. Taylor’s novel, The Soul of Kindness (1964) takes the theme of devoted affection, or kindness, and questions what kindness is for when the feeling is conditional. ‘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.

At the opening of The Soul of Kindness, Flora Secretan is getting married. She is leaving behind her devoted mother, Mrs Secretan, and she is being fussed over by her school friend, Meg Driscoll, her bridesmaid. As a 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 fussing bridesmaid.

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 meet 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 Flora’s wedding 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 person of Flora Quartermaine or Emma Woodhouse. I feel doubly nervous.

Elizabeth Taylor may be little known, but her stories can teach us a lot about surface; she peels it away and critiques gentility, critiques what it means to be gentle and kind. She is psychological in her approach to talking about women, which is a relief to me as someone who wants to teach writing about women in a way that allows for depth.