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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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Women in blue
Among London’s many delights are the blue plaques that mark buildings associated with historical personages both famous and obscure....
Deborah Yaffe
May 8, 2019
Jane Austen's first critic
For Janeites, it’s salt rubbed in a wound: the news that scholars will soon be able to inspect a fascinating trove of letters from an...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 7, 2019
Lucky thirteen
Name the ten most important vegetables! Quick now! Does broccoli outrank kale? How about carrots vs. turnips? Yes, yes, I know they’re...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 12, 2018
Dweeby Darcy
Edward IV, who reigned as king of England for most of the period from 1461-1483, was described by contemporaries as an unusually handsome...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 13, 2017
Austen sleuthing
Although “Jane Austen Detectives” sounds like the title of a beach book I’d want to read, it’s actually the name of a sixteen-month-old...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 7, 2016
Sharing scholarship
And here's the second addition this week to the category of Nifty Web Sites I Only Just Heard About: The 18th-Century Common, “a public...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 3, 2016
Six degrees of Austen
For years, movie buffs have entertained themselves with a game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: Start with Movie Actor #1, name a movie...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 31, 2016
That Hamilton woman
Jane Austen was only seven when the American War of Independence ended, and as far as I know she is not on record either pro or con –...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 3, 2016
The Austen Catch-Up Project: Jenny Uglow
The classics are timeless, we are told. Their freshness has no sell-by date; their concerns seem as urgent in our times as in the times...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 29, 2016
The Austen Catch-Up Project: Roy and Lesley Adkins
The 2007 movie of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel The Jane Austen Book Club opens with a montage designed to evoke the noise, stress and...
Deborah Yaffe
May 29, 2016
Mr. Darcy's six-pack
The British actor Matthew Macfadyen – whom many Janeites remember fondly as Darcy in the 2005 feature-film version of Pride and Prejudice...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2015
Mr. Darcy, slave trader?
“Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy made his fortune from slavery”! “Romantic hero profited from the misery of others”! So scream this week’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 11, 2015
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