April - 2023

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

Deborah Yaffe

Austen in the dreamscape

Australians may have a complicated relationship with Britain, their one-time mother country, but no such ambivalence seems to pervade...

Deborah Yaffe

False advertising?

Like many Janeites, I know scattered bits of Austen by heart. I can proclaim the first sentences of Pride and Prejudice and Emma, recite...

Deborah Yaffe

On this day in 1811. . .

Eighty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s traditional to envision Jane Austen as a homebody, and...

Deborah Yaffe

Jeopardy and peril at Chawton House

Twenty years ago this summer, American tech mogul and Janeite Sandy Lerner finished up her multimillion-dollar restoration of an...

Deborah Yaffe

Installing Austen

A hot London designer plans to honor Jane Austen, along with other female writers, in a multimedia installation housed at an Australian...

Deborah Yaffe

A controversial rarity

Because Jane Austen’s letters are such rare and precious gems, it’s semi-big news whenever one of the extant 160(ish) turns up on...

Deborah Yaffe

Failures

As a way to make a living, writing pretty much sucks, as most writers not named James Patterson or Malcolm Gladwell can tell you. So I...

Deborah Yaffe

Star attraction

Jane Austen has had friends in high places for a very long time. In 1815, she famously accepted an offer (one of those offers you can’t...