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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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Tempest in a teapot
Jane Austen is delightful. Tea parties are lovely. Raising money for college scholarships is admirable. So I’m ninety percent happy...
Deborah Yaffe
May 22, 2025
Dancing as if it's 2005
Twenty years, to quote Captain Wentworth, is “a period, indeed”—more than enough time “to change every pore of one’s skin, & every...
Deborah Yaffe
May 19, 2025
Immersion
While Hampshire, England, is Ground Zero for Austen 250 celebrations, we Americans are doing our best to participate—and this week, the...
Deborah Yaffe
May 8, 2025
Regency playdate
Exactly 250 years ago, England saw the birth of a great artist whose innovations forever changed our culture. I speak, of course, of...
Deborah Yaffe
May 1, 2025
The other talented Austen sister
Cassandra Austen’s family considered her a skilled artist, but for most Janeites, her claim to artistic fame rests, uneasily, on a single...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 28, 2025
Austen footsteps, Southampton edition
The city of Southampton makes no one’s list of England's top Jane Austen sites. Although she briefly attended school there as a child and...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 20, 2025
Dancing through the library
Universities across the country are confronting declining enrollments in humanities fields such as history, literature, and philosophy....
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 6, 2025
Matters of faith
What were the precise contours of Jane Austen’s religious faith? It’s an open question, given the slenderness of the evidence: some stray...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 27, 2025
Tunes
“To be quite honest, I do not think I can live without something of a musical society,” the newlywed Mrs. Elton reports telling her...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 17, 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
Castle games
At first blush, The Austen Experience seems the stuff of Janeite dreams: A spring weekend spent swanning around a Swedish castle in...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 6, 2025
Celebration, by any name
A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2, 2025
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