July - 2020

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

Jane talks back

Jane Austen lived a very long time ago, in a world whose gender roles, social conditions, and technological context are largely alien to...

Deborah Yaffe

Ruins

Tom Lefroy’s house is crumbling away. To Janeites, this may seem poetic justice for the young Irishman who danced and flirted with the...

Deborah Yaffe

Cash for cream teas and champagne

The havoc that pandemic lockdown has wreaked on an array of arts and cultural organizations is old news by now. Janeites have seen a...

Deborah Yaffe

Dining out

I don’t know about you, but I miss dinner parties. You remember dinner parties: those occasions on which you gathered with friends –...

Deborah Yaffe

Reckoning with the past

By now, it’s no surprise to find Jane Austen’s name surfacing in discussions of Britain’s unsavory imperial history: The debate over the...

Deborah Yaffe

Passing Go

In case you were wondering how high the bar for Janeite gift-giving could be set, wonder no longer: Josh Jordan, a twenty-nine-year-old...

Deborah Yaffe

Festival weekend

Just a reminder that this weekend will be an exciting one for Janeites: the online version of the popular Jane Austen Festival–held, in...

Deborah Yaffe

Happy birthday, JAS

A thousand years ago – or, actually, back in January – the big Janeite news of 2020 was shaping up to be the eightieth anniversary of the...

Deborah Yaffe

The Watsons, reborn

Among the Janeite casualties of pandemic lockdown was the planned West End production of The Watsons, Laura Wade’s much-praised...

Deborah Yaffe

Back to the gardens

The world continues to take baby steps toward reopening after quarantine. For Janeites, the latest encouraging sign is that the gardens...