Life 5/13

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

Family letters

As we Janeites know to our sorrow, only 160 of Jane Austen’s letters survive, and some of those are filled with details that mean little...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 8, 2022

In the stars

Jane Austen was a Sagittarius. Would she have cared? Or, as a clergyman’s daughter and a pious Anglican, would she have rejected the...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 28, 2022

Feeding the beast

The appetite for Jane Austen-adjacent content never seems to flag, at least in the Anglophiliac precincts of PBS. If you ate up Season...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 30, 2022

On this day in 1811. . .

Seventy-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s novels famously contain few detailed...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 6, 2022

On this day in 1801. . .

Seventy-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. How autobiographical is Jane Austen’s writing? Impossible...

Deborah Yaffe

May 12, 2022

On this day in 1805. . .

Seventy-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Leigh-Perrot, who was married to the older brother of...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 21, 2022

On this day in 1817. . .

Seventy-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters The letter that Jane Austen wrote to her 11-year-old niece...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 14, 2022

Jane all around

Jane Austen turns up in the most unexpected places, doesn’t she? Here’s where she’s been in the past week: --Jane Austen and true crime:...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 31, 2022

On this day in 1801. . .

Seventy-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Moving out of one house and into another is a stressful,...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 3, 2022

Stocking stuffers

Christmas is almost here, but I have no sugar plums or partridge-equipped pear trees with which to gift my blog readers. Instead, I will...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 23, 2021

Many happy returns

Two hundred and forty-six years ago today, a daughter was born to Cassandra Leigh Austen and her husband, the Reverend George Austen. The...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 16, 2021

On this day in 1798. . .

Sixty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 25, 2021