Updating the syllabus
In the bad old days of pre-1980s academia, you could major in English literature and never be assigned a novel by Jane Austen—or so I’ve...
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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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Deborah Yaffe
- Aug 17
Testing, testing
In spring 2022, the right-wing British press ginned up a storm of outrage over the claim that a Scottish university had dropped Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
- Dec 5, 2022
Treasures of the collection
A year after a priceless nineteenth-century literary collection was rescued from the auction block and donated to public institutions...
Deborah Yaffe
- Oct 27, 2022
Read all about it
Like most writers, Jane Austen was a reader, avidly consuming the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose of her day. Her letters offer...
Deborah Yaffe
- Sep 15, 2022
Broadening the collection
The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 13, 2022
Recommended reading
To Janeites – indeed, to anyone who’s read semi-widely and who isn’t V.S. Naipaul – it’s obvious that women are capable of writing great...
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 28, 2022
Under the floorboards
When I was a little girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse. I liked setting up tiny roomscapes filled with detailed, perfectly manageable...
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 11, 2022
Revising the syllabus
Is Jane Austen an essential author? Must all English majors – all readers, even! – get to know her work before they can count themselves...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 24, 2022
Pride and penitentiary
The white supremacist sympathizer assigned to read Pride and Prejudice will now have enough time to get through all six of Jane Austen’s...
Deborah Yaffe
- Dec 9, 2021
Crunch time
Kids! Always leaving their homework to the last minute! Last summer, as blog readers will recall, a British judge sentenced a young man...
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