January - 2019

The Line of Thought

. . . to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Deborah Yaffe

A house in Austen country

As regular blog readers know, I find few pursuits more enjoyable than the ogling of Jane Austen-related real estate. This week’s...

Deborah Yaffe

The mysterious Rice portrait, again

One of the Janeite world’s most enduring mysteries/controversies concerns a charming eighteenth-century oil painting of a young girl in a...

Deborah Yaffe

On this day in 1817. . .

Forty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Only hindsight makes anything remarkable out of the letter...

Deborah Yaffe

Printer error

Few expressions of Janeite commitment are as permanent -- not to mention as painful -- as the Jane Austen tattoo. Therefore, I’d have...

Deborah Yaffe

Family album

The Janeite world is a-twitter (and a-Twitter) this week over the serendipitous discovery of a Victorian photo album filled with pictures...

Deborah Yaffe

Penguin of destiny

Literary critics turn up in the most unexpected places. Last November, the Maryland Zoo, in Baltimore, asked the public whether this...

Deborah Yaffe

A tourist in Bath

Last Thursday, James McAvoy, the excellent Scottish actor who played Jane Austen’s crush Tom Lefroy in the 2007 film Becoming Jane, paid...

Deborah Yaffe

Kids in America

Over the weekend, I went to see Clueless: The Musical. It made me miss Clueless: The Movie. Which was probably not the intended effect....

Deborah Yaffe

Party like it's 2019

Over the last eight years, we’ve marked a plethora of Jane Austen anniversaries: the bicentennials of the publications of all six of her...