May - 2021

Blog

Deborah Yaffe

On this day in 1811. . .

Sixty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen was perfectly capable of writing a sensitive...

Deborah Yaffe

Austen-linked fixer-upper

By now, I’m used to reading real estate listings that hype every tiniest link to Jane Austen: An oast house on a farm where her father...

Deborah Yaffe

Reboot, booted

Back in late 2019, when corona was just a neighborhood in Queens, the news broke that Hollywood was considering a television reboot of...

Deborah Yaffe

Clueless no more

Last month, we Janeites felt a tad confused -- dare I say clueless? -- when Netflix and MRC Entertainment announced plans to produce a...

Deborah Yaffe

One hundred candles

Back in 2011, when the research for my book Among the Janeites took me on the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual tour of...

Deborah Yaffe

Data storage, the Jane Austen way

Anyone whose college papers reside on now-unreadable floppy disks has probably wondered whether the human race is on the brink of an...

Deborah Yaffe

Be careful what you wish for

The #Sisterhood, it seemed, had won. For more than a year, the online fandom known as the #SanditonSisterhood has lobbied tirelessly for...

Deborah Yaffe

Interrogating an interrogation

Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...

Deborah Yaffe

Fifty Shades of Anne

Years ago, when the Harper Collins Austen Project was announcing which contemporary authors would undertake its modernizations of Austen...