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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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Everyone's a fan
Discovering a fellow Janeite can be a bittersweet experience. Sometimes it’s the delightful reassurance that you’re not alone in your...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 26
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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