September - 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

Lucky thirteen

Thirty-nine years ago, during my first semester of college, I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia to attend my first Jane...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 29, 2022

Over the summer, when Janeites weren’t arguing about the controversial new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, many were praising the...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 26, 2022

MGM’s 1940 movie of Pride and Prejudice was the first screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and with its Victorian fashions,...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 22, 2022

A few months ago, I noted that the British royal family appears to include a critical mass of women who are crazy about Jane Austen. (Or...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 19, 2022

The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 15, 2022

Nine months have passed since we learned the happy news that a cache of priceless books and manuscripts, including two Jane Austen...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 12, 2022

From time to time, a particular news item brings a snippet of Jane Austen’s wisdom forcibly to mind – such a snippet as, say, “One half...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 8, 2022

Last week, a beautiful young woman ended her longstanding romantic relationship with a good-looking guy old enough to be her father. Or...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 5, 2022

Seventy-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In December of 1775, the Rev. George Austen wrote to a...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 1, 2022