April - 2021

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

Virtual Austenland

We all hope our offscreen lives will soon resume, but in the meantime, our gatherings remain virtual. For Janeites, that’s meant online...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 29, 2021

When Keira Knightley was cast as Elizabeth Bennet in the 2005 feature film of Pride and Prejudice, she worried that her performance would...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 26, 2021

It’s Oscar night on Sunday, and even though this year will inevitably lack the red-carpet glamor of pre-pandemic times, I will avidly...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 22, 2021

The BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is known among Janeites by various shorthands: * There’s “the wet-shirt P&P,” for...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 19, 2021

Jane Austen is usually thought of as a quintessentially English writer, what with all those landed estates, rural rectories, and mannerly...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 15, 2021

One of the many, many reasons I am glad not to live in the time of Jane Austen – right up there with the absence of antibiotics, reliable...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 12, 2021

Janeites have a curious affinity for images of Our Author – even though, as I’ve noted before, we’ll never really know what she looked...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 8, 2021

Jane Austen’s death is tragic, because she died at only forty-one, at the height of her artistic powers. It’s also mysterious – the...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 5, 2021

Sixty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. From time to time, you will hear writers claim that they...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 1, 2021