November - 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

Nov 30, 2023

Second chances

July 1997. A lavish birthday party for a controversial royal paramour. Her old flame and current lover, the future king of England, rises...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 27, 2023

Short and sweet

Fellow novelists do not invariably appreciate Jane Austen—looking at you, Charlotte Brontë!—but it’s always a pleasure when they do. And...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 23, 2023

Roots

As my family and our guests gather around our Thanksgiving table today, the menu will include a roasted carrot salad discovered in a...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 20, 2023

Rebooting Clueless: The Musical

Almost five years ago, I saw the off-Broadway production of Clueless: The Musical and found it a disappointingly pallid version of the...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 16, 2023

Jane Austen universe(s), Part II

If you spend your days reading Jane Austen novels and consuming Jane Austen adaptations and talking to fellow Jane Austen fans and...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 13, 2023

Janeite abroad

Jane Austen has a substantial following in Ukraine, it seems. This is not something I knew two years ago, but a lot has changed in the...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 9, 2023

Decompressing with Jane

In the past seven years, I’ve blogged at least twice about a recurrent motif: reading Jane Austen for a temporary escape from the horrors...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 6, 2023

Adaptable

In the two centuries since Jane Austen’s death, her novels have proved almost infinitely adaptable, transmuted into stage plays, radio...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 2, 2023

Correspondence course

Last year, the Huntington Library in Southern California announced the acquisition of an annotated trove of nearly four hundred letters...