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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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Bookshelf for sale
At the back of Rebecca Romney’s new book Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 27, 2025
Clearing the backlog
It’s been a grand total of four weeks since I last reported on Jane Austen-related misinformation/foolishness on the internet. And...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 24, 2025
Treasure trove
Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk , often described as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a laptop, is usually on display at the...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 6, 2025
Whale watching
Did Herman Melville read Jane Austen? Chronologically, he could have—he was born two years after Austen’s death—but temperamentally, it...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 23, 2024
Bolt from the blue
Does Jane Austen owe her fame to an excellent publicist? The legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein says yes—or at least maybe—in a recent LitHub...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 3, 2024
Mad about the Regency
The third season of Bridgerton, Netflix’s smash-hit Regency romance series, launches today. To mark the occasion, a professor at...
Deborah Yaffe
May 16, 2024
Seven paragraphs to read if you want to
I should probably spend less time thinking about stupid clickbait listicles that mention Jane Austen. My mental health would improve. My...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2024
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...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 14, 2023
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
Aug 17, 2023
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
Dec 5, 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
Oct 27, 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
Sep 15, 2022
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