May - 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

On this day in 1811. . .

Eighty-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Nowadays, when a new acquaintance turns out to be the...

Deborah Yaffe

May 29, 2023

It’s a great time for programming at Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen wrote or revised all six of her...

Deborah Yaffe

May 25, 2023

It’s been a sadly long time since I strolled through the garden at Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen...

Deborah Yaffe

May 22, 2023

Titles can’t be copyrighted, but usually, this isn’t a problem: No one is likely to mistake a classic Victorian novel for a 1970s boxing...

Deborah Yaffe

May 18, 2023

Over the past four years, the British actor Adrian Lukis has spent a lot of time being Mr. Wickham. In late 2019, Lukis – who, as...

Deborah Yaffe

May 15, 2023

Mr. Darcy, aka Colin Firth, is riding a white horse when he comes home to Pemberley, aka Lyme Park, in the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation...

Deborah Yaffe

May 11, 2023

Back in 2004, when Margaret Sullivan launched the indispensable AustenBlog, she chose a tagline that reflected Jane Austen’s pop-culture...

Deborah Yaffe

May 8, 2023

It’s a truism that the best way to improve your writing is to read the work of good writers. Apparently, this maxim holds true even for...

Deborah Yaffe

May 4, 2023

The untimely death last year of the acclaimed historical novelist Hilary Mantel was immediately recognized as a tragic loss for the world...

Deborah Yaffe

May 1, 2023