August - 2022

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

Diving deep

We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new....

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 29, 2022

The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice turns up everywhere, most commonly a) when a journalist who doesn’t know much about Jane Austen...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 25, 2022

Early last Tuesday morning, I opened up my phone to Wordle, the now-famous daily word-finding puzzle, and typed my usual starting guess:...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 22, 2022

Seventy-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. “Write what you know,” aspiring authors are counseled in...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 18, 2022

Attention, bargain hunters! Five years ago, you would have needed £9 million (about $11 million) to buy Luckington Court, the Cotswolds...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 15, 2022

It’s never a bad time to talk about Persuasion–really, what are you doing that’s more important?--but right now may be an especially good...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 11, 2022

As we Janeites know to our sorrow, only 160 of Jane Austen’s letters survive, and some of those are filled with details that mean little...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 8, 2022

Jane Austen never wrote a sequel. Among her many excellent qualities was a sure sense of when to leave well enough alone. Alas, too many...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 4, 2022

Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 1, 2022