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

Deborah Yaffe

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

If the shoe fits. . .

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

In the mind's eye

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

Deborah Yaffe

Irritating pet-peeve annoyance

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

Deborah Yaffe

On this day in 1808. . .

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

Bowled over

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

Interview of a lifetime?

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

Jane Austen speaks . . . sort of

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

Not so young

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

Deborah Yaffe

Treasure chest

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