Have you ever wondered what your most beloved fictional characters’ favourite Taylor Swift songs would be? Probably not, but as a lover of books and a self-proclaimed Swiftie, I admit that it’s a question I sometimes find myself pondering.
This is hardly surprising when you consider that Taylor Swift is quite the storyteller in her own right (listen to ‘All Too Well’ and tell me I’m wrong) and is also something of a keen reader. References to classic works of literature appear throughout her discography, from ‘Love Story’ to ‘happiness’, and she’s publicly professed her love for the books of Daphne du Maurier, F. Scott Fitzgerald and even Sally Rooney. Taylor Swift lyrics are a veritable treasure trove of literary references, so much so that decoding them is almost as much fun as decoding her numerous Easter eggs.
So that, plus the fact that Red (Taylor’s Version) comes out today, got me thinking. The result is this very long post that absolutely no one asked for, in which I reveal my thoughts on the favourite Taylor Swift songs of some of literature’s most famous characters. Please consider it my magnum opus as a professional book blogger.
Read on …
Catherine Earnshaw, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Favourite Taylor song: ‘Red’
Loving him is like
Trying to change your mind
Once you’re already flying through the free fall
Like the colours in autumn, so bright
Just before they lose it all
With the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) later this afternoon, it seems fitting to kick off with the title track from that album for one miss Catherine Earnshaw. With her all-consuming passion for Heathcliff that crosses over into somewhat unhealthy territory (to put it mildly), Cathy strikes me as a girl who’d be a big fan of this song.
Lily Bart, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Favourite Taylor song: ‘I Did Something Bad’
I never trust a playboy
But they love me
So I fly ’em all around the world
And I let them think they saved me
As a scandalous socialite who finds herself struggling to stay afloat in the vicious New York social scene, Lily Bart’s favourite Taylor Swift song absolutely has to be something from reputation. She spends much of the novel attempting to ensnare herself a rich husband while battling her own dodgy reputation and making several very bad decisions, so I imagine this song to be a kind of personal anthem for her.
Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Favourite Taylor song: ‘New Romantics’
Baby, we’re the new romantics
Come on, come along with me
Heartbreak is the national anthem
We sing it proudly
Immortalised onscreen by Audrey Hepburn in the classic film, Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly is a much more complex creature. She chases wealthy New York men in the hopes that one of them will marry her and lift her out of her precarious situation, but in doing so plays dangerously with her heart and her happiness. A true new romantic.
Becky Sharpe – Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Favourite Taylor song: ‘Blank Space‘
‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream
Unscrupulous and willing to become whoever she has to be in order to climb that social ladder, I’ve decided that Becky Sharpe’s fave song would have to be ‘Blank Space’. Plus, the novel’s keen satirisation of early 19th-century British society is perfectly on par with Taylor’s satirisation of, well, herself.
Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
Favourite Taylor song: ‘The Man’
And I’m so sick of them coming at me again
‘Cause if I was a man
Then I’d be the man
My favourite Shakespearean heroine Beatrice puts up with a lot of nonsense from some of the men in this play, but particularly from her rival and eventual lover, Benedick. At one point he basically compares her to a squawking bird — at which I personally would have committed homicide — but Beatrice holds her own with wit and badassery. Her line ‘O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace’ lives in my head rent-free.
Edmund, King Lear by William Shakespeare
Favourite Taylor song: ‘Look What You Made Me Do’
And then the world moves on, but one thing’s for sure
Maybe I got mine, but you’ll all get yours
Beatrice might be my favourite Shakespearean character, but the one who fascinates me the most has to be Edmund, Shakespeare’s bastard traitor from King Lear. A murderous liar with a chip on his shoulder, Edmund is hell-bent on gaining land and power, but also exacting revenge against his father. He relies on no divine being, but his own cunning — rep-era Tay would approve.
Juliet Capulet, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Favourite Taylor song: ‘ivy’
Oh, I can’t
Stop you putting roots in my dreamland
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I’m covered
Bet you thought I was going to pick ‘Love Story’ didn’t you? Nope. Juliet Capulet speaks some of the most beautiful lines Shakespeare ever wrote, and I think she’d appreciate the gorgeous lyricality of ‘ivy’, Taylor’s song of forbidden love.
Miss Havisham, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Favourite Taylor song: ‘mad woman’
And there’s nothin’ like a mad woman
What a shame she went mad
No one likes a mad woman
You made her like that
Jilted at the altar by the scheming Compeyson (the ‘master of spin’, you could say), poor Miss Havisham decided to go the full drama route and stop the clocks to live out her wedding day for the rest of her life. And then adopted a little girl whom she would bring up to ‘wreak revenge on all the male sex’. A ‘mad’ woman indeed — I think she’d feel fully vindicated by this quietly furious song.
Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Favourite Taylor song: ‘Wildest Dreams’
You’ll see me in hindsight
Tangled up with you all night
Burnin’ it down
Someday when you leave me
I bet these memories
Follow you around
I just know that Jay Gatsby loves the idea of Daisy wistfully pining after him for the rest of her life, and the Taylor Swift song with the strongest ‘yearning from afar’ energy has to be ‘Wildest Dreams’.
Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Favourite Taylor song: ‘State of Grace’
We are alone with our changing minds
We fall in love ’til it hurts or bleeds, or fades in time
And I never saw you coming
And I’ll never be the same
Hello and welcome to the Jane Austen segment of this post. I actually found Lizzie Bennet the hardest Austen heroine to choose a song for and nearly swapped her out for another Bennet sister entirely (I’d have gone with Lydia Bennet and ‘London Boy’, this is non-negotiable). Anyway, I think ‘State of Grace’ really captures that sense of love being a shock to the system, which is part of what makes Lizzie and Darcy such a compelling pair.
Anne Elliot, Persuasion by Jane Austen
Favourite Taylor song: ‘champagne problems’
I dropped your hand while dancing
Left you out there standing
Crestfallen on the landing
Champagne problems
I very nearly picked ‘exile’ for Anne, but I think she’d relate more to ‘champagne problems’ — a song about knowing you broke someone’s heart when you couldn’t be with them. Poor Captain Wentworth — she would have made such a lovely bride …
Fanny Price, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Favourite Taylor song: ‘You Belong With Me’
If you could see that I’m the one
Who understands you
Been here all along
So, why can’t you see?
You belong with me
Oh Fanny, you dear thing. Watching the man you love fall in love with a woman you don’t trust is no fun at all, and it’s a feeling with solid ground in the Swift canon. Fanny is a bit of a wallflower who doesn’t give much away at first, and I can see her relating hard to this anthem.
Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Favourite Taylor song: ‘illicit affairs’
And you know damn well
For you I would ruin myself
A million little times
Anna is a woman who literally ruined her own life for a man who, just quietly, was not worth it, but we all know the feeling of falling for someone we know might not catch us.
Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Favourite Taylor song: ‘seven’
But I, I was high in the sky
With Pennsylvania under me
Are there still beautiful things?
I’m not convinced that Holden would be a Swiftie in any sense of the word, but I think he’d definitely find something to love in this beautiful and quiet song about childhood and innocence.
Alice, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Favourite Taylor song: ‘Wonderland’
You search the world for something else
To make you feel like what we had
And in the end, in Wonderland, we both went mad
Yes I’m about to be extremely obvious here, but I don’t care. ‘Wonderland’ is a banger, Alice would totally love it.
Jo March, Little Women by Lousia May Alcott
Favourite Taylor song: ‘A Place in this World’
Oh, I’m just a girl
Trying to find a place in this world
This song from Taylor’s earliest years as a recording artist would definitely speak to our beloved, fiercely independent, canoe-paddling little woman Jo, whose spirit doesn’t always feel quite at home.
Thank you for joining me on this frivolous ramble through literature and Taylor Swift’s discography.
Tell me what you think your favourite character’s most-loved song would be in the comments!
About the Contributor
Olivia Fricot
Olivia Fricot (she/her) is Booktopia's Senior Content Producer and editor of the Booktopian blog. She has too many plants and not enough bookshelves, and you can usually find her reading, baking, or talking to said plants. She is pro-Oxford comma.
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