Is Taylor Swift a Jane Austen for our Times?
From a small town, with middle-class parents and staunch Christian roots, she went on to conquer the world with the honesty, emotion and wit of her writing.
This accurately describes Jane Austen – and also Taylor Swift. In this month’s Musings, Dr Gabrielle Malcolm draws some surprising parallels.
As a young girl of just eleven years of age, Taylor Swift’s parents encouraged her creativity and musical ambition. (She was named after singer-songwriter, James Taylor.) She has always written stories, she says, and learned to sing in church and, with the influence of her grandmother Majorie Findley, a well-known opera singer and TV personality in her own right.
A family that helped to nurture her along a creative pathway is something she has in common with Jane Austen. Jane’s family are widely known to have helped her channel her creativity. Austen’s father bought her a writing slope; when she was eight years old, her brothers staged family amateur theatricals, while the household at Chawton supported her writing so she could actively publish her novels.
Swift’s life, like Austen’s, was punctuated with movement. She lived on a Christmas Tree farm in Pennsylvania for a time and spent summers in New Jersey. Then, when she was 14, her father took a job in Tennessee where she was closer to the home of country music in Nashville. In another echo of Austen, Swift displayed a precocious talent and wanted to record her life and memories in words and song from a young age. She released her first album, the self-titled ‘Taylor Swift’ in 2006 when she was just 16.
I asked some Taylor Swift fans about their favourite lyrics and how her work affects them. I was able to choose young and old, male and female fans because her appeal has a universal quality that defies typical demographics and categorisation – something she also shares with Austen.
From Vicky (in her 30s): “I love how visceral her lyrics are. They don’t hold back from exploring themes of rage, fury, absolute loss – but there’s also a joyfulness and a play about them.” Anna (in her 20s) feels even more rawness, claiming that Swift’s songs often deliver a “gut punch” and can also “tell both sides”. She says that Swift “tells both sides, calling out herself as much as whoever she’s writing about.”
Swift is self-deprecating, like Austen, as well as a biting and uncompromising satirist when called on.
Swift is self-deprecating, like Austen, as well as a biting and uncompromising satirist when called on. The negative criticism she faced about her dating life and career choices was answered in her track and video for The Man (2020). In this she depicted, in full make-up, what her life would be ‘if I were a man’, demonstrating the double-standards she has to face.
Anne Elliot’s responses to accusations about women’s character and fidelity in Persuasion (1817) came two hundred years before Swift’s critique on the dominance of male voices:
“I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.”
“Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
Austen’s, ‘Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story … the pen has been in their hands’ is an utterly timeless comment, unfortunately. She tells it in a pithy direct way. Swift also recognizes this with her lyrics in The Man:
“They’d say I hustled
Put in the work
They wouldn’t shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve.”
Deserving and undeserving women, worthy and unworthy women. This is the tangle into which Austen inserts her voice in the Regency years to highlight how precarious a woman’s position might be. Swift understands this competition and judgement in her twenty-first century experiences.
Ed (in his 40s) listens to Swift because she is a “storyteller” with “relatable” lyrics. She crosses the gender divide easily. He commented: “I really like artists with story-telling in their music. Her songs have characters you get to know and plot lines you want to follow.”
Swift has story-telling in her music. Austen has music in her story-telling.
I encountered many Swift fans who also identify as Janeites. They have a love in common for characters, language and emotion in the writing of both women. The crossover is there for them in the skill that both Swift and Austen possess for honest communication and conveying their sense of friendship and affability. In the film of her 2024 Eras tour, Swift addresses the audience in Los Angeles as a “soul mate kind of a crowd”. She is always reaching out to her fans, in a way that Austen could not of course, but we do enjoy the novelist’s sensibilities in a similar way. As she wrote in Northanger Abbey, “I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
Through her characters, we feel we have an understanding with Austen, knowing that she was ‘all in’ with friendship and not doing things by halves. The same can be said of Swift and her work. As one avid Janeite informed me, Swift is also a “balm for the soul.”
