I CAME to Jane Austen’s “Emma” in my 50s, which is late for many Austen aficionados. The story of a wealthy 21-year-old woman who lives with her father and imagines herself a matchmaker hadn’t caught my attention until then. At first, I was made uneasy by Emma as she imagines romance where it isn’t and misses it where it is. But during a caregiving crisis in my life, I lost count of how many times I read or listened to Austen’s novel. I turned her words over in my mind like a piece of slowly melting hard candy.

Early on in tending to my mother, who had Alzheimer’s, I was sustained by other Austen novels, but during the middle stages of her disease it was all “Emma,” all the time. What started as entertainment soon became an important guide.

It seemed that I was always one step behind her illness, so I stockpiled books on caregiving, including Kenneth P. Scileppi’s “Caring for the Parents Who Cared for You.” When I read his statement “In the life of a demented individual, there is one cardinal rule: All change is for the worse,” the person I thought of wasn’t my cognitively impaired 92-year-old mother; it was Emma’s father, Mr. Woodhouse. He is introduced to us as “a nervous man” who hated “change of every kind.”

The novel asserts that Emma had little to distress or vex her, yet describes many distressing and vexing events. Emma is parenting her parent and has been doing so for quite some time.