Deborah YaffeSep 28, 2023Avatar seeks agentJane Austen should fire her agent. In her lifetime, Austen earned £684 from her books—perhaps $87,000 in today’s money.* That modest sum...
Deborah YaffeSep 25, 2023Dress-up for grownupsAs blog readers will recall, the Library of Congress hosted its first-ever Literary Costume Ball earlier this month. Since then, I’ve...
Deborah YaffeSep 21, 2023Austen's not-so-secret LondonThe biographical record suggests that Jane Austen was essentially a country girl, much happier during the many years she spent in rural...
Deborah YaffeSep 18, 2023On this day in 1796. . . Eighty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The British have a well-documented penchant for discussing...
Deborah YaffeSep 14, 2023Updating the syllabusIn the bad old days of pre-1980s academia, you could major in English literature and never be assigned a novel by Jane Austen—or so I’ve...
Deborah YaffeSep 11, 2023Tok prizeIn case you find yourself worried that Kids These Days just aren’t what they used to be—in other words, what we used to be—here’s some...
Deborah YaffeSep 7, 2023Icing on the cakeIt’s turning into a self-promoting kind of week. After taking a bow on Monday for my small contribution to the ginormous task of...
Deborah YaffeSep 4, 2023Victory lapLess than two weeks ago, apropos of my latest effort to stamp out the online plague of fake Jane Austen quotes, I wrote, “I like to...
