‘Out of Style’: Taylor Swift, Genre, and the Victorian Novel

Known all too well for her name in popular culture, Taylor Swift is gaining a reputation in literary circles, too. To enchanted listeners, she’s not just a singer-songwriter; she’s a poet as well. Following the release of Swift’s eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), Stephanie Burt published an article in The Nation that recognised Swift’s mastery of literary devices, ranging from apostrophe and hyperbole to slant rhyme. Burt is certainly not alone in her attention to Swift as a wordsmith. In PopMatters, Piper Dutton similarly contends with Swift’s status as ‘The Great American Poet’, suggesting it is her appeal to rhythm and feeling that makes her lyrics distinctly poetic. Swift’s songwriting has even proven to inspire contemporary poets, with the publication of Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, edited by Kristie Frederick Daugherty and featured on The New York Times and Literary Hub.

Taylor Swift’s lyrics not only speak now to modern fans, poets, and critics, but also echo past literary eras. Paying homage to the Romantics, she declares, ‘Baby, we’re the new romantics’, in ‘New Romantics’ (lines 13, 19, 33, 39, 56, 62), and her lyrics in ‘The Lakes’ call to mind Wordsworth: ‘I’ve come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze / Tell me what are my words worth / Take me to the Lakes where all the poets went to die’ (lines 10-12).  For Taylor Swift, this line between songwriter and literary writer is delicate, especially when it comes to genre. While her self-identification and critical reception align her work most explicitly with poetry, there lies a blank space in Taylor Swift literary studies for the novel.

Writers and users across webpages and social forums, including SparkNotes and Reddit, have located references to classic novels in many of Swift’s lyrics. Yet the claim that Swift emulates the novelistic style is not widely considered. Though not as apparent as her connection to poetry, Swift does at times take up the voice of a prose writer. The lyricist/narrator in ‘Dear Reader‘, for instance, addresses her listener/reader in ways not unlike Charlotte Brontë’s use of direct address in Jane Eyre. In ‘The Manuscript‘, too, Swift positions herself (as a subject) more so as playwright than poet, as ‘she re-reads [her] manuscript’ (line 1) and observes her past ‘like scenes of a show’ (line 21). The song’s opening lines might even position Swift (the songwriter) as a novelist:

Now and then she re-reads the manuscript

Of the entire torrid affair

They compared their licenses

He said, “I’m not a donor but

I’d give you my heart if you needed it”

She rolled her eyes and said, “You’re a professional”

He said, “No, just a Good Samaritan”  (lines 1-7)

Between her third-person omniscient narrator and character dialogue, these lyrics assume the form of prose more broadly.

From another point of view, Swift’s use of first-person voice is notable in ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ through her narrative retrospection on a past love. Although the relationship has ended in pain, the lyricist repeats that she remembers ‘all too well’ how their lives once were. Beth Nguyen calls the song a memoir-essay that carries a ‘double perspective’, a term Phillip Lopate uses to describe how a narrative’s ‘now-narrator is always looking back at a prior self’ (Nguyen). While Nguyen likens Swift’s use of ‘double perspective’ to Edith Wharton’s approach to narration and time in The Age of Innocence, I suggest that Swift’s appeal to the novel extends beyond the American realist tradition.

Such perspective also fills the pages of Thomas Hardy’s Victorian novel Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). At different moments, the lyrics of ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ resonate with the perspectives of Fanny and Bathsheba and mirror Hardy’s novelistic take on love and control.  Through parallels between the two, I consider an association between Swift and the Victorian novel that goes beyond allusion – though ‘I will surmise’ (if I may borrow Swift’s line) that the scholarly Swift could probably know Hardy’s work. She did, after all, in a pandemic interview with Paul McCartney admit to reading ‘books like Rebecca’ and drawing inspiration from Daphne du Maurier’s word choice for her eighth album, folklore (2020). Here, however, I argue that the connection between author and songwriter emerges not merely through influence but more strikingly ‘out of style‘.  Read alongside Hardy, Swift’s diction, tone, and narrative voice feel quite timeless.

The song begins with Swift recalling how her former lover has held on to her scarf even now that the relationship is no more:

I walked through the door with you, the air was cold

But something ’bout it felt like home somehow

And I left my scarf there at your sister’s house

And you’ve still got it in your drawer, even now  (lines 1-4)

Through these lines, the scarf functions in a similar way to hair in Far from the Madding Crowd. Like the man in Swift’s situation, Troy’s keeping of women’s hair serves as a sign of possession in two instances: his claim to Bathsheba’s hair ‘in remembrance of [her]’ after he cuts it with his sword in Chapter XXVII (Hardy 163) and his preservation of Fanny’s ‘curl of hair’ in his watch, which Bathsheba discovers in Chapter XL (Hardy 237).

The subsequent fallout between Bathsheba and Troy and Troy’s supposed death by water result in Bathsheba’s retrospection of what her life once was before marriage:

She kept the farm going… and expended money on ventures because she had done so in bygone days, which though not long gone by seemed infinitely removed from her present.  She looked back upon that past over a great gulf, as if she were now a dead person having the faculty of meditation still left in her by means of which… she could sit and ponder what a gift life used to be.  (Hardy 289, italics added)

From a similar point of view, Swift reminisces about a former life:

Oh, your sweet disposition and my wide-eyed gaze

We’re singing in the car, getting lost upstate

Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place

And I can picture it after all these days

And I know it’s long gone and

That magic’s not here no more

And I might be okay, but I’m not fine at all  (lines 5-11, italics added)

Like Bathsheba, Swift meditates on the past from the perspective of a distant present. Just as Bathsheba ‘ponder[s] what a gift life used to be’ (Hardy 289), Swift reimagines the magic she used to feel in her relationship. While the ‘magic’ Swift recalls is in reference to her ‘long gone’ relationship (lines 9-10), Bathsheba’s past and more desirable life on the farm too seems ‘long gone’ (Hardy 289).

From Fanny’s perspective, Troy’s expression of love comes all too late. As the narrator recalls, Troy’s interaction with her corpse reveals where his true love lies: ‘He sank upon his knees with an indefinable union of remorse and reverence upon his face, and, bending over Fanny Robbin, gently kissed her…’ (262). It is only when Fanny is dead that Troy admits his love for her. He confesses that she ‘is more to [him], dead as she is, than ever [Bathsheba was]’ (263) and that Bathsheba ‘[is] nothing to [him]’ (264). In a similar way, Swift reflects on how she once pondered that her lover’s utterance of his love would come too late:

And I was thinking on the drive down, any time now

He’s gonna say it’s love, you never called it what it was

’Til we were dead and gone and buried

Check the pulse and come back swearing it’s the same

After three months in the grave

And then you wondered where it went to as I reached for you

But all I felt was shame and you held my lifeless frame  (lines 23-29)

Here, Swift imagines that her lover will never verbally express his love in her lifetime, not unlike Troy when he kisses Fanny’s ‘lifeless frame’ (line 29).

Like Hardy, Swift also plays with the ideas of possession and secrecy, merging them into a metaphor: ‘And there we are again when nobody had to know / You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath’ (lines 38-39). Quite literally, Troy keeps Fanny as a secret. Metaphorically, however, he also keeps Bathsheba ‘like a secret’. He possesses her but is not sworn to her. Also reminiscent of Bathsheba’s perspective, Swift goes on to compare the effect the relationship has on her to the destructive breaking of a promise:

Well, maybe we got lost in translation

Maybe I asked for too much

But maybe this thing was a masterpiece

’Til you tore it all up

Running scared, I was there

I remember it all too well

And you call me up again just to break me like a promise

So casually cruel in the name of being honest  (lines 42-49)

Bathsheba similarly suggests that Troy tore up their relationship in his decision to keep another woman’s hair. She laments Troy’s neglect in a testament to her own commitment: ‘… when I married you your life was dearer to me than my own. I would have died for you…’ (238). Even though Bathsheba wants to know Fanny’s secret (258), a cruelty exists in such honesty. When Troy candidly confesses his feelings for Fanny, the truth breaks her: ‘”If she’s – that, – what – am I?” she added, as a continuation of the same cry, and sobbing brokenly’ (263-264, italics added). Bathsheba takes Troy’s honesty as a breach in the promise of marriage – and Hardy, like Swift, uses language of ‘breaking’ to describe the effect it has on her.

Hardy’s novel and Swift’s lyrics are also aligned through the function of women’s beauty. Throughout Hardy’s pages, Bathsheba’s beauty holds influence and power over men. As Troy admits, he falls for Bathsheba because of her looks: ‘If Satan had not tempted me with that face of yours… I should have married [Fanny]’ (263). Likewise, Swift considers the effect her radiance has on her relationship: ‘The idea you had of me, who was she? /A never-needy, ever-lovely jewel whose shine reflects on you’ (lines 56-57). This depiction of Swift’s speaker as a jewel mirrors Hardy’s representation of Bathsheba as a gem: ‘No gem ever flashed from a rosy ray to a white one more rapidly than changed the young wife’s countenance…’ (Hardy 242). In both cases, outer appearances construct men’s perceptions of women.

Critical of the foundations of their relationships, Swift and Bathsheba long for their past lives. As Swift sings, ‘I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it’ (line 66), Hardy’s narrator reveals Bathsheba’s desire to return to the position she held before marriage: ‘Until she had met Troy Bathsheba had been proud of her position as a woman; it had been a glory to her to know that her lips had been touched by no man’s on earth, that her waist had never been encircled by a lover’s arm. She hated herself now’ (239). Bathsheba’s bitter remembrance of her self-sufficiency and independence mirrors Swift’s suggestion that her relationship has changed her.

Whether these parallels are ‘accidental’ or ‘by design’ (Swift’s phrasing), what makes Swift a mastermind in the literary realm is her appeal across genres. Structurally, it seems most fitting to compare her lyrics to poetry through the rhythms, sounds, and emotions they evoke. But Swift doesn’t just rhyme. She plots. ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ might not take up the form of a novel, but it strikes a chord with one nonetheless. Songwriter, poet, autobiographer, and storyteller, Taylor Swift is not too far from the novelistic crowd either.

Amber Alsaigh is a PhD student studying Victorian literature, women writers, and the transatlantic nineteenth century at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research explores depictions of women’s vocality as a source of female agency and creative authority. She has additional interests in genre and the relationship between literature and popular culture throughout ‘the eras’.

Notes & references

Hardy, Thomas. Far from the Madding Crowd.  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Rosemarie Morgan with Shannon Russell, Penguin Books, 2000.