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Journalist and author
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
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Hatching time
Like periodical cicadas, Austen adaptations come around on a predictable schedule. Every ten or fifteen years, a newly hatched crew of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 24
Clueless again?
The 1995 film Clueless is many things—a beloved teen comedy, the locus classicus for indispensable expressions like “As if!” and one of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7
Second banana no more
Ella Bruccoleri is a hard-working young British actress whose roles so far have been distinctly second banana. I’ve seen her as a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 16
Ball of the year?
Hard as we Americans try, there are some things we just can’t do as well as the British. Last month, as blog readers will recall ,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 12
P&P, Vanity Fair edition
When Pride and Prejudice was published in early 1813, Jane Austen had a few regrets. “It wants shade,” she wrote to her sister,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 9
On the rise
This week, British Janeites were treated to a new TV docudrama/literary-historical-biographical analysis/250th birthday tribute called...
Deborah Yaffe
May 29
Sister act
If you spend any time online, you’ve probably encountered a version of that ubiquitous, tired clickbait, the “Which Jane Austen heroine...
Deborah Yaffe
May 26
Dancing as if it's 2005
Twenty years, to quote Captain Wentworth, is “a period, indeed”—more than enough time “to change every pore of one’s skin, & every...
Deborah Yaffe
May 19
Here we go again
The first still-extant screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice , the MGM movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier as Elizabeth...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 24
May flowers
I began this post intending to convey some news eagerly awaited by Janeites who, like me, will see just about any movie that claims an...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 10
P&P on a budget
These days, it’s hard not to despair at the state of the world. But all is not lost: You can go online and find a guy lip-syncing his way...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 3
Branding exercise
A few weeks ago, I ran across a 2011 article in which the wonderful Scottish novelist Ali Smith explained why she seldom grants...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 3
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