Life

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

Jul 18

What remains

Two hundred and seven years ago today, Jane Austen died in Winchester, England, at the age of forty-one. It’s easy to forget how...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 15

Endangered Dolphin, Part II

The moral seems clear: Bonnets are no match for the brutal imperatives of capitalism. It’s been five months since the owners of a failing...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 24

Making it up as you go along

I love the way the internet just makes stuff up. Kidding! I hate the way the internet just makes stuff up—not least when the stuff it...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 20

Endangered Dolphin

In December 1793, during a visit to cousins in the Hampshire city of Southampton, the soon-to-turn-eighteen-year-old Jane Austen danced...

Deborah Yaffe

May 23

Noses to the grindstone

Just three weeks after Jane Austen’s House launched its much-hyped group effort to transcribe the unpublished memoir of Austen’s older...

Deborah Yaffe

May 20

On this day in 1813. . .

Ninety-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Only about two years of Jane Austen’s childhood were spent...

Deborah Yaffe

May 13

Too good to check

Journalists like to joke that some stories are “too good to check”: so juicily entertaining that the last thing you want is to attempt...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 29

Written by hand

Gather ‘round, children, and let me tell you about the olden days, when elders such as myself spent long hours, in school and out,...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 1

On this day in 1816. . .

Ninety-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Just when you think it’s safe to go back in the water. . ....

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 8

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

Jan 25

On this day in 1801. . .

Ninety-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. A curious—and curiously contemporary--passage appears in the...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 8

Headline magic

If you read the UK media, you might be forgiven for thinking that no story about British real estate is complete without a link to Jane...