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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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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Celebrating significance
At my synagogue, members sometimes engage in public religious rituals to mark what we discreetly call “significant birthdays”--in other...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 16, 2024
Jane Austen's fingerprints
In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s....
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 9, 2024
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