December - 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

Saved!

Genuinely good news – a commodity that’s been in short supply this past year – came our way earlier this month, with the announcement...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 30, 2021

This past year, we can probably all agree, hasn’t been one of the planet’s best. But there’s still time to end 2021 on a happier note –...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 27, 2021

Christmas is almost here, but I have no sugar plums or partridge-equipped pear trees with which to gift my blog readers. Instead, I will...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 23, 2021

Jane Austen isn’t just for girls, of course, but the Austenesque tidbits that the internet has tossed my way lately happen to focus on...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 20, 2021

Two hundred and forty-six years ago today, a daughter was born to Cassandra Leigh Austen and her husband, the Reverend George Austen. The...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 16, 2021

In George Orwell’s 1984, the dictatorial regime ruling Oceania requires its minions to drop documentation of inconvenient historical...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 13, 2021

Kids! Always leaving their homework to the last minute! Last summer, as blog readers will recall, a British judge sentenced a young man...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 9, 2021

Seventieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The author of Pride and Prejudice may have been an anonymous...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 6, 2021

Jane Austen assuredly never saw a penguin: According to the Zoological Society of London, it wasn’t until 1865, nearly fifty years after...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 2, 2021