October - 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

Scary monsters

Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 31, 2022

Like most writers, Jane Austen was a reader, avidly consuming the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose of her day. Her letters offer...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 27, 2022

Eightieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Nowadays, an unpublished writer can upload her...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 24, 2022

This fall and winter, every Janeite workweek starts with “Austen Monday”—the evening on which the Rosenbach, Philadelphia’s museum and...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 20, 2022

People who hate Jane Austen – yes, such benighted folks do exist – sometimes claim that she is so-o-o boring that she causes eyelids to...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 17, 2022

The smashing success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has ushered in a new era of multiracial casting in Regency costume dramas. This is good...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 13, 2022

For Janeites, the Austen First Edition Thrill-o-Meter is calibrated something like this: Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 10, 2022

Janeites first discover Jane Austen at different moments in their lives. I’ve talked with people who read her first in a high school or...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 6, 2022

We all read Jane Austen for different reasons. (I wrote a whole book about this phenomenon.) Some read her for the lucidity of her...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 3, 2022