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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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Regency runway
I know very little about fashion, as my invariably pedestrian wardrobe choices make immediately clear to everyone I meet. (Who needs Elle...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 10
Frank disappointment
Jane Austen seems to have adored her older brother Francis. In the handful of letters that survive from their correspondence, she...
Deborah Yaffe
May 12
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
Reading Jane Austen in a vacuum
We Janeites never tire of pointing out all the qualities that make Austen special. We’re not wrong to do so--few writers are as good as...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 24
Lab work
The Race and Regency Lab, an intriguing new scholarly project that aims to “reimagine our understandings of race” in Jane Austen’s era,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 12, 2024
The bad old days
How badly off were women in Jane Austen’s England? It’s a question I’ve been mulling lately, amid a spate of recent commentary asserting...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 8, 2024
Interrogating an interrogation
Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2021
Old issues, new questions
Five years ago, I wrote a magazine article about the controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s repugnant racial views – an aspect of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 11, 2021
Dining out
I don’t know about you, but I miss dinner parties. You remember dinner parties: those occasions on which you gathered with friends –...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 20, 2020
Reckoning with the past
By now, it’s no surprise to find Jane Austen’s name surfacing in discussions of Britain’s unsavory imperial history: The debate over the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 16, 2020
Companions
Thirteen years ago, when PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre aired a new adaptation of Jane Eyre, the network offered viewers a chance to buy...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 15, 2019
Free to be. . .
On this holiday of freedom from tyranny, including the tyranny of conventional expectations, it seems appropriate to spend a moment...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 4, 2019
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