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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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Bowled over
In the early days of our romance, my now-husband, a Brit with a deep fondness for the sports of his island home, tried valiantly to...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 12, 2023
On this day in 1796. . .
Eighty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The British have a well-documented penchant for discussing...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 18, 2023
On this day in 1806. . .
Eighty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. I’ve noted before that, as a poet, Jane Austen was a great...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 24, 2023
Semi-native daughter
Jane Austen’s stays in the southern English port of Southampton were short-ish and not especially happy. As a seven-year-old, she...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 20, 2023
(Un)happy childhoods
I suppose I should no longer find it bemusing when false, misleading, or completely unsubstantiated information about Jane Austen’s life...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 17, 2023
Dear diary
Let me start by pointing out that I do understand the concept of clickbait. Really, I do. But still, I’m left breathless at the moxie of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 10, 2023
On this day in 1808. . .
Eighty-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The letter Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 26, 2023
Failures
As a way to make a living, writing pretty much sucks, as most writers not named James Patterson or Malcolm Gladwell can tell you. So I...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 6, 2023
Tom Lefroy, commitment-phobe?
Consider the term “fuckboy”: --“A womanizer; a young man who sleeps with women without any intention of having a relationship with them ....
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 30, 2023
On this day in 1801. . .
Eighty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In January 1801, the twenty-five-year-old Jane Austen was...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 9, 2023
Slush
Today, it’s called the slush pile: the tottering heap of unsolicited manuscripts that clog the mailboxes—these days, the email boxes—of...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 7, 2022
Expensive thrills
For Janeites, the Austen First Edition Thrill-o-Meter is calibrated something like this: Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 10, 2022
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