top of page
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
Search
Jane Austen in love . . . maybe
Nine months have passed since we learned the happy news that a cache of priceless books and manuscripts, including two Jane Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 12, 2022
Diving deep
We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new....
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 29, 2022
Still talking
It’s never a bad time to talk about Persuasion–really, what are you doing that’s more important?--but right now may be an especially good...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 11, 2022
In the stars
Jane Austen was a Sagittarius. Would she have cared? Or, as a clergyman’s daughter and a pious Anglican, would she have rejected the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 28, 2022
Janeites in conversation
“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do,” Miss Bates exults in chapter 21 of Emma. In context, she is...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 11, 2022
Bonnetfest closeup
If you’re a Janeite who can’t make it to Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art this summer – and will therefore miss your chance for an...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 9, 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 28, 2022
What lies beneath
In popular culture, Jane Austen is the avatar of buttoned-up romance – love stories featuring heroines concealed under long skirts and...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 4, 2022
Sharing a cuppa
Just a few days ago, I returned from a visit to family in England. In my natural habitat, I’m not much of a tea drinker; absent a sore...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 21, 2022
Bonnetfest
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – in other words, in mid-2019 -- I wrote about a traveling exhibition of costumes from Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 17, 2022
Women's letters, women's lives
Texts and emails have much to recommend them, but it’s hard not to wonder how much their prevalence will handicap future biographers....
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 24, 2022
SandiCon no more
They could not be defeated by a host of implacable foes: mediocre reviews, low viewership numbers, bottom-line-driven corporate...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 27, 2022
bottom of page