Jane Austen is a little bit country

Loretta Lynn, a coal miner's daughter, a gentleman's daughter, and women getting by

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Hello dear friends,

This is the week where we have to stop what we’re doing and just listen to some Loretta Lynn, who died October 4, at the age of 90.

We realize this is not necessarily the place where you’d expect to find a Loretta Lynn tribute. It might feel more appropriate to find a tribute to, say, Queen Elizabeth II, in this Jane Austen community. 

But to that we say: Think again, friends!

When seen through the prism of the poetry of Loretta Lynn lyrics, Jane Austen can look a little bit country, writing as she does on themes of home, family, displacement, poverty, love, and longing. Like Austen, Lynn wrote the lives of marginalized women, and what she wrote out of necessity became groundbreaking art. Photo: pawel szvmanski | Unsplash

There’s plenty to be said on royalty, the royal family, and celebrity, and we have some thoughts on that coming up (watch for an upcoming post: The Mediated Princess, on Diana, the Queen, royalty, and celebrity - and Jane Austen).

But the links to what Loretta Lynn was doing, that we often can’t see plainly enough, and what Jane Austen was doing, that we often can’t see plainly enough, are loud and clear for us here at the Austen Connection.

So we had to stop what we were doing, put on some Loretta Lynn records, and write to you about this.

First, are there any Jane Austen readers and Loretta Lynn listeners out there? Anyone else reading in the Regency while your stereo is piping through some deep country twang? If so, let us know!

Perhaps there are more of us than we think - and here at the Austen Connection, if you haven’t listened, really listened, to what Loretta is saying, here’s a chance to turn up the volume on this art, and to look at it through the prism of Austen’s art while you’re doing it.

So: What is it that ties together the coal miner’s daughter and the gentleman’s daughter? The answers may surprise you!

The big thing, friends, is that both are simply female artists using the power of words to harness the chaos, the violence, and the pain of their surroundings, and reshaping them into something enduring that dazzles us and connects us. They are taking close experience, and transforming it into something powerful by using the tools available to them - scrap paper, a guitar, two bits of ivory.

But that’s the big thing. So let’s look at that last.

First, let’s look at some smaller, more or less obvious things that these two women artists bring to their work that in all cases tend to be overlooked and, like so much to do with Jane Austen, they are hiding in plain sight.

‘I can’t feel at home in this world anymore’ 

And when we look at the things driving Loretta Lynn’s art it brings up some of our favorite things driving 18th and 19th century women artists - and one of those key things is a sense of displacement. A search for home.

Loretta Lynn was married by some accounts at around the age of 15, and had several children by the time she was 17, and was doing all of this not in Butcher’s Hollow, Kentucky, where she’d grown up as a coal miner’s daughter but she was rather in the US state of Washington, where she felt out of place, lonely at home while her husband worked and frequented bars, and she was putting it down on paper and writing what was going on in her head.  

This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through
My treasures and my hopes are all beyond the blue
For many Christian children have gone on before
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

-Loretta Lynn, ‘I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore’

Austen also dealt with displacement: She spent nearly a decade moving around after a sudden announcement by her parents, the Rev. George and Mrs. Cassandra Austen, that they were moving to Bath and eventually the second-oldest son James and his family would be taking over the Steventon parsonage that Jane Austen had always called home. 

The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of its proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings. “And of this place,” thought she, “I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt.”

-Jane Austen, ‘Pride and Prejudice’

That instability, insecurity and the fantasy of a home and security in both land and family is key to Austen and her stories - and we should always look past the lighthearted, comedic tones of the courtship plot Austen wrote in, and also beyond the lighthearted, upbeat pacing of Lynn’s country songs, to see the need and the insecurity driving the story.

‘I’m proud to be a coal miner’s daughter’

Later the simple act of a woman centering and writing her life would be called feminist.

But all it is, is this: Looking squarely at who you are, where you come from, recognizing that while the world might not see its value that doesn’t have to stop you from seeing its value, and resolving to not only state your origins but to state them proudly. To stand right up to it. To make something of it.

Through story. Because both Austen and Lynn are, ultimately, storytellers.

Yeah, I'm proud to be a coal miner's daughter
I remember well, the well where I drew water
The work we done was hard
At night we'd sleep 'cause we were tired
Never thought of ever leaving Butcher Holler

-Loretta Lynn

In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal... I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.

-Elizabeth Bennet, in Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’

This means that in a world where you are going to be looked down on for your social class, your gender, your race, your situation or who you love, that you can stand up and fight in the face of things you cannot control and also in the face of outright oppression.

This is all over country music, from Dolly to Johnny.

 

“If you’re looking at me,” Lynn sings proudly, “you’re lookin’ at country.”

“For you to get to him I’d have to move over,” she writes, “And I’m going to stand right here.”

But Loretta Lynn joins a chorus of extreme examples from country music - Hank Williams, Johnny Cash - of taking impoverished origins, also taking the chaos, the violence, the oppression that can come with both poverty and also celebrity, and turning it into something strong and beautiful.

And we know that, but here’s what we forget, friends: We look for the source of that alchemy turning poverty into strength in an artist’s life. Yes, we look for it in their life. 

And it’s partly in the life. But it’s mostly in the art. 

It’s tempting to see the surface - a woman standing and telling her story of being a coal miner’s daughter, simply describing how they didn’t have shoes in summer but got new ones by winter, “daddy always managed to get the money somewhere.” But those building key changes throughout the song say something bigger. Every time that key changes up, it signals that this is about something more. This is not just one woman’s story, it’s every woman’s story. It’s maybe America’s story, humanity’s story.

When Loretta Lynn says, “You’re not woman enough to take my man,” we already know that infidelity, neglect, and abandonment is a very real situation faced by humans through the ages - full of confusion, danger, humiliation, and pain. But the transformation of experience into art, into something funny, and reframing it into a show of strength - strength found inside oneself, in a resignation - is something that happens through the process of picking up a pen (and a guitar) and saying what’s impossible and humiliating to say, and saying it in the glare and glam of the Nashville Sound, or fashionable Bath.

The transformation of experience into art, into something funny, and transforming it into a show of strength - strength found inside oneself, in a resignation - is something that happens through the process of picking up a pen (and a guitar) and saying what’s impossible and humiliating to say, and saying it in the glare and glam of the Nashville Sound, or fashionable Bath.

“I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal,” says Elizabeth Bennet to the haughty Lady Catherine de Bourgh in our favorite Jane Austen showdown. That confrontation would go on to launch a thousand memes.

The power comes not from the fictional situation; it comes from the orchestration, and the orchestrator, of that situation. 

It’s the brave, willful act of writing it down, shaping it, reshaping it, and sending it into the world, that gives that situation its power. 

And that power comes from someone, it comes from a conductor. That conductor is the artist. It is Loretta Lynn, and it is Jane Austen. 

‘I sat down by the sea, and it whispered to me’

Time, loss, regret, longing - this is the stuff of poetry, of all great art.

At its best, it gives us a sense of where we are not only on this great earth, but where we are in the grand scheme of time, and also how time changes us.

This song by Lynn and so many songs by Lynn and country music artists evoke this unbearable feeling of regret, and hope, and where we are right now in relation to where we’ve been. And not only where and when we’ve been - but who we’ve been and who we are. How our experiences through time and place shape us.

That sense of time and what it does to us is so palpable in country music, it can be hard to listen to. You could be forgiven for feeling the same about Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” like Austen’s Persuasion evokes both this sense of place and time and its power to shape us, and how we can use art and memory to revisit these places and reflect on who we’ve been and who we’ve yet to be.

Well, I thought I'd left behind all his love but I was blind
I should have known that there was no use to pretend
I thought a new love I would find, and you would never cross my mind
But the whispering sea, it talked to me

-Loretta Lynn, ‘Whispering Sea’

Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals, – all, all must be comprised in it: and oblivion of the past – how natural, how certain too! 

-Jane Austen, ‘Persuasion’

When we watch the above video of Loretta Lynn performing, in a white gown, with a full band in the background, singing about growing up in Butcher Holler and connecting, joking with her audience - and again, those key changes, building the stakes in the story, what we see before us is a transformation, someone who has emerged into something, and has done it through storytelling, and art, and by deploying the magical sense of time, and memory, and its transformational power, in that artistic process.

All of this is what makes the character and the story of Anne Elliot and Persuasion, which as we’ve said before just constantly has us in a state of regret, return, reflection, change, and hope for what is to come, with a resolve to face it in the way of our choosing as we go forward.

Anne Elliot, meet miss Ms. Loretta Lynn.

Scrap paper, a guitar, and two bits of ivory

Loretta Lynn, like so many of the great country artists surrounding her - Johnny Cash, Wille Nelson, her friend and mentor Patsy Cline - was first and foremost a writer. You could easily say: a poet. 

That’s the first thing that is hard to see, when we think about Loretta Lynn and her songs. We tend to see them as taking “country” situations - alcohol, domestic strife, infidelity, longing, loss, loneliness, and putting them to snappy, even humorous tunes as a way of dealing with them.

And that is what is happening. But we allow the upbeat tunes to drown out the art and the agency of what is behind it, in the lyrics.

And it turns out the same thing has happened to Jane Austen over 250 years: Because her longing, and loss, and negligence, and injustice of the world is placed into a comedy and a courtship plot, it’s all too easy to assume that the humorous, lighthearted approach was actually Jane Austen’s approach to her life and her art. 

It was anything but. Austen was dead serious about her art, even though she knew she had to hide her ambition, in order for her stories to actually get out there and get published. 

Like Jane Austen, Loretta Lynn wrote, toured, and created her art because she needed the money. Sometimes critics, scholars of both Austen and Lynn are reluctant to see not only the art, and the ambition, but also the need and necessity, behind their work. But it’s there, loud and clear.

In this fascinating American Masters portrait of Loretta Lynn, you can see this overlooking of the art and the ambition of a woman creator at work. One of the male sources, a music writer, repeatedly describes Loretta Lynn’s artistic process as sort of happening accidentally, and then orchestrated by the men in her life. It was in fact Lynn’s husband, whom she remained married to until his death in 1996, who first suggested that she bring her songs and her guitar down to the bar he hung out in. 

When she first performed music she was displaced, living in Washington, and far from her family and from the Butcher Holler where she’d grown up as a coal miner’s daughter. 

But, surely it wasn’t just a shy Loretta (who was, actually, shy) being pushed on stage and singing little ditties about her life. To do what comes next required ambition, strength, dedication, genius - leaving her kids, chatting up record execs across the country, touring more than 200 days a year some years, conducting business in glitzy Nashville, and then going on to cut 51 country music hits and winning, in reverse order, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Honors, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Entertainer of the Year from the Country Music Association, the first one woman to do so - all while your husband stays home with the kids and his drinking, and his issues. 

No little girl who doesn’t have ambition, who isn’t a legendary storyteller, and who isn’t an artist can do all that.

One moving testament to Loretta Lynn as an artist is this story from the musician Jack White, who produced Lynn’s Van Lear Rose album in 2004. White claims that for that album Lynn gave him a mass of papers with songs written on them (in the American Masters episode you can also see a pile of songs written on scrap paper) and says that they simply took the first 10 or so, and all were brilliant so he didn’t even attempt to go through all of the songs.

Lynn is someone who is, at a very young age, paying attention to her experience, making that experience into words and notes, taking the trouble to write those words and notes down on whatever is at hand and in a way that makes sense of that experience, and giving the experience back to the universe in a way that makes it something on its own - a new thing. 

Loretta Lynn is someone who is, at a very young age, paying attention to her experience, making that experience into words and notes, taking the trouble to write those words and notes down on whatever is at hand and in a way that makes sense of that experience, and giving the experience back to the universe in a way that makes it something on its own - a new thing. 

A funny thing, or a sad thing, or a beautiful thing - but also a thing that has structure and composition and that gives one a sense of remaking life, and reshaping it into something beautiful, and then sending it back into the universe in the hopes that it connects, and communicates, to another human in some way. 

And in that connection and communication it becomes again something else. And all that is an alchemy that you’ve created through your close, at-home experience by simply harnessing it through the tools you have available - scrap paper, a guitar, two bits of ivory.

And when you do that you have become an artist - whether you are doing it from a little house full of kids in the hills of America, or you’re doing it in the Regency among the glare of revolution, class oppression, and ballrooms. 

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Thank you for listening to Loretta Lynn with us, Jane friends.

Here’s hoping your weekend is bringing you some beauty, some art, some fun, and a whole lot of country. 

Let us know: Do you enjoy this somewhat stretchy connection between country music and Jane Austen? Do you see connections between the Regency or Jane Austen and country music or Loretta Lynn that we’ve missed? It’s very possible! If so, share! 

And: What’s in your CD/album rotation these days, and do you ever connect it to your reading, whether your Regency romances or historical fiction, or classic lit? 

Let us know what you’re reading, what you’re listening to! And most importantly, stay well, and stay in touch, friends.

Yours most truly and twangy,

Plain Jane

Cool stuff!

• Here’s the PBS American Masters episode on Loretta Lynn And here’s the section on Lynn from the PBS Ken Burns series “Country Music”: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unum/playlist/loretta-lynn#dont-come-home-drinkin

• Here’s the NPR obituary on Loretta Lynn, and if you’re interested in exploring how Lynn is situated politically and in the landscape of feminism and country music, this is a great discussion.

• Here’s a lovely reflection from Vic and Jane Austen’s World on a sense of home in Jane Austen, one of our favorite themes here at the Austen Connection

• A special thanks to our own Catherine - punk-rocker, bluegrass-jammer, fiddler, guitar-strumming balladeer, emerging sociologist, and amazing human, who inspired this post and our renewed appreciation for Dolly Parton, Townes Van Zandt, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and of course, the queen, Loretta Lynn.

  

  Thanks, Catherine

   

• And, save the date for a special live edition of the Austen Connection podcast, with Devoney Looser at the marvelous AustenCon, happening Saturday, Nov. 5, or Friday, Nov. 4, depending on your location. It’s a great festival to join virtually, whether you’re there for happy hour Friday night, breakfast Saturday morning, or somewhere in between - it’s a chance to connect with Jane Austen readers, scholars, authors, and podcasters across the globe. We’ll be engaging in a live conversation about Devoney Looser’s new book Sister Novelists that drops this month. This is our current read here at the Austen Connection and it is fantastic - you can preorder that book here.

  Sister Novelists Countdown!

• The Austen Connection podcast is currently rolling out season 3, and we’ll be back in your inbox very soon with the next episode featuring our conversation musicologist Stephanie Shonekan - we cannot wait for you to hear this conversation about reading Jane Austen and Regency romance in Nigeria. Also coming up we have guests professor John Mullan and we just added author Robert Morrison, who headlined the recent JASNA AGM with a highly original take on Sense and Sensibility that is leaving people reeling yet at the same time … convinced! We cannot wait to share with you what this is all about. Those episodes will drop right into your inbox if you’re a podcast subscriber, and you can also find them wherever you get your podcasts, including right here and on Spotify and Apple.

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