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

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

Jul 30, 2020

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

Jul 27, 2020

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

Jul 23, 2020

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

Jul 20, 2020

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

Jul 16, 2020

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

Jul 13, 2020

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

Jul 10, 2020

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

Jul 9, 2020

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

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 6, 2020

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

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 2, 2020