Janeites/Anti-Janeites 3/14

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

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 3, 2022

CryptoJane

Back in 2013, when the Bank of England announced that Jane Austen would be the face of the £10 note, little did we know that less than a...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 28, 2022

Janeite on a sled

The unholy spectacle of a Russian coach berating a fifteen-year-old figure skater after an epic public fail shadowed by a doping scandal...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 13, 2022

With friends like these. . .

For the most part, I love my fellow Janeites. By and large, we are a smart, thoughtful bunch who, whatever our political, temperamental,...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 19, 2021

Raising Jane(ites)

Long ago, I danced at a JASNA ball with a twelve-year-old girl who, when I asked if she was a Janeite, told me that she had “been raised...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 19, 2021

A Janeite passes on

Two months ago, I noted a Janeite milestone: the one hundredth birthday of Helen Lefroy, a dedicated Janeite with a familial link to Jane...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 8, 2021

A poet of the ordinary

A poet whose work I didn’t know died the other day. Stephen Dunn was a Pulitzer Prize winner who “specialized in poems about surviving,...

Deborah Yaffe

May 17, 2021

One hundred candles

Back in 2011, when the research for my book Among the Janeites took me on the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual tour of...

Deborah Yaffe

May 6, 2021

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

Mar 29, 2021

Happy birthday indeed

For most people, this past year has been at best pretty bad and at worst utterly tragic. On the bright side, however, the challenge of...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 25, 2021

Mars and Venus

These days, Jane Austen enthusiasts are often typecast as college girls swooning over Matthew Macfadyen, or middle-aged women dressing up...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 15, 2021

Sanditon fans build a second season

It’s been more than a year since the producers of Sanditon announced that the show, a TV mini-series based on the novel Jane Austen left...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 8, 2021

Janeites from eight to eighty-eight

We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels can be enjoyed at any age, albeit in different ways, and seldom has a week’s news brought...