Jane and the feathered friend
Jane Austen assuredly never saw a penguin: According to the Zoological Society of London, it wasn’t until 1865, nearly fifty years after...
top of page
Journalist and author
Blog
Search
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 8, 2021
All the Janes
Janeites have a curious affinity for images of Our Author – even though, as I’ve noted before, we’ll never really know what she looked...
Deborah Yaffe
- Nov 2, 2020
Cat person
A cheerful story with a political angle—and a Jane Austen twist! On the eve of Election Day here in the stressed-out, locked-down,...
Deborah Yaffe
- Sep 17, 2020
Cock-a-doodle-doo
In vain have I struggled. It will not do. Even though it bears no relation to anything else going on in Jane Austen World, you must allow...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 14, 2019
Penguin of destiny
Literary critics turn up in the most unexpected places. Last November, the Maryland Zoo, in Baltimore, asked the public whether this...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 25, 2018
Jane Austen, romance novels, and a chihuahua
Jane Austen’s relationship to the romance novel is a vexed topic. For every article calling her the founding mother of the genre (or...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 11, 2018
Mr. Darcy, eating out of your hand
Some years ago, I attended a picnic sponsored by my local branch of the Jane Austen Society of North America, to which a fellow JASNA...
Deborah Yaffe
- Oct 2, 2017
SOS for Chawton's horses
Although the Shire horses of Chawton House Library have been dispersed to new homes, the local campaign to reverse that decision...
Deborah Yaffe
- Sep 18, 2017
Chawton Kremlinology
The ongoing saga of Chawton House Library’s beloved Shire horses – likely casualties of the Austen site’s cost-cutting campaign – is...
Deborah Yaffe
- Sep 7, 2017
Goodbye to Chawton's horses
When Silicon Valley multimillionaire Sandy Lerner opened Chawton House Library in 2003, the new Janeite landmark in Hampshire, England,...
Deborah Yaffe
- Aug 10, 2017
Puppies and prejudice
During World War I, historians tell us, Jane Austen’s novels were sometimes prescribed to traumatized British soldiers as a remedy for...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 20, 2016
Kitten pictures. Need I say more?
I’m not a big fan of cute animal pictures on the internet, but hey – when cute animal pictures with a Jane Austen connection show up on...
bottom of page