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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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Pemberley in peril
Two years ago, under intense financial pressure, the Republic of Pemberley, the largest online Jane Austen fan community, downsized to a...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 14, 2016
A Dear Jane letter
Every Janeite has probably fantasized about meeting the woman herself. What would we say? What would we ask her? Would we babble...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 17, 2016
Austen on the Hill
I’m sure I speak for many American Janeites when I boldly assert that Congress would be a better place if more of its members read Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 13, 2016
Vintage Arnie
Readers of my book Among the Janeites may remember one particularly colorful character: Arnie Perlstein, the Florida lawyer who...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 13, 2016
I is for intervention
The year is young, and already I’ve read a book that I consider a masterpiece worthy of my rare five-star Goodreads rating, which I...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 1, 2016
Voting Austen onto the island
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister – in other words, the head of Scotland’s semi-autonomous government – is a famously patriotic...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 19, 2015
Famous non-friend likes Austen
It’s always nice to find Austen fans in semi-unexpected places. Today’s entry comes from this recent interview with Joshua Malina, a star...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 2, 2015
James on Jane
The popular, movie-inflected view of Jane Austen is so thoroughly imbued with stereotypical, romanticized girliness – fair maidens,...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 21, 2015
Janeite retirement
One of the many pleasures of researching Among the Janeites was the chance it gave me to meet fellow Austen fans from across the country...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 20, 2015
Books to flee by
In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Soviet spies burrowed deep into the British Foreign Office, realized they were on the brink of...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 9, 2015
Miss Price goes to Washington
Jane Austen has been a semi-regular presence in the New York Times Book Review’s weekly “By the Book” feature, in which noted authors...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 9, 2015
May Jane be with you
Fandom need not be monogamous. “It's apparent that there is a fannish personality,” the dance historian Allison Thompson told me when I...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 19, 2015
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