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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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Giddyap!
“Jane Austen is 2-for-2 entering her stakes debut,” I read last month in an online publication I don’t usually consult. “Trained by Mark...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 22, 2024
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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...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 2, 2021
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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
Apr 8, 2021
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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
Nov 2, 2020
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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
Sep 17, 2020
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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 14, 2019
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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 25, 2018
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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
Jan 11, 2018
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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
Oct 2, 2017
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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 18, 2017
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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
Sep 7, 2017
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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
Aug 10, 2017
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