Deborah YaffeJul 28, 2022In the starsJane Austen was a Sagittarius. Would she have cared? Or, as a clergyman’s daughter and a pious Anglican, would she have rejected the...
Deborah YaffeJul 25, 2022Cue the wine and cheeseLast spring, as blog readers will recall, the London Times announced that Persuasion was the sixth most popular book on TikTok, the...
Deborah YaffeJul 21, 2022Something to talk aboutGoogle the Omniscient doesn’t seem to know if it was Henry Ford, P.T. Barnum, or somebody else entirely who first declared, “I don’t care...
Deborah YaffeJul 18, 2022In praise of repressionEarly on in Netflix’s polarizing new adaptation of Persuasion, Anne Elliot leafs through a scrapbook in which she has preserved accounts...
Deborah YaffeJul 14, 2022On this day(ish) in 1814. . . Seventy-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The letter-writing culture of Jane Austen’s day was...
Deborah YaffeJul 11, 2022Janeites in conversation“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do,” Miss Bates exults in chapter 21 of Emma. In context, she is...
Deborah YaffeJul 7, 2022Damage controlYou’re a couple of weeks away from premiering your new movie. Your core audience has been vacuuming up every scrap of news about the...
Deborah YaffeJul 4, 2022The computer-generated Jane AustenIt’s Independence Day here in the United States. What better occasion to consider the question of how soon our computer overlords will...
