October - 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

It's that time again

Signs of autumn: Falling leaves. Halloween pumpkins. And the Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, which...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 30, 2023

The annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America is coming up next week in Denver, and with it that age-old...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 26, 2023

Jane Austen’s physical descriptions of her characters are famously sparse. But if you ask me, Anne Elliot, Emma Woodhouse, and Elizabeth...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 23, 2023

The next paragraph of this blog post contains a phrase--taken from a recent piece on StudyFinds, a website that summarizes the...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 19, 2023

Eighty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Novelists are a ruthless bunch. They find grist for their...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 16, 2023

In the early days of our romance, my now-husband, a Brit with a deep fondness for the sports of his island home, tried valiantly to...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 12, 2023

I knew it! Jane Austen loves me! “Kindred spirits, indeed!” the author, dead since 1817, told me last week. “Our friendship would have...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 9, 2023

On October 3, I conducted a Facebook Messenger chat with Jane Austen, or at least with the AI named after her--one of twenty-eight AI...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 9, 2023

“First-edition books are often worth a small fortune,” the British magazine MoneyWeek reported recently, summarizing research by an...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 5, 2023

Chawton House, the Elizabethan mansion in Hampshire once owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward, is one of the treasures of the Janeite...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 2, 2023