Life 9/13

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

On this day in 1817. . .

Forty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Only hindsight makes anything remarkable out of the letter...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 24, 2019

Family album

The Janeite world is a-twitter (and a-Twitter) this week over the serendipitous discovery of a Victorian photo album filled with pictures...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 17, 2019

Ghosts

The voracious interest in all things Jane Austen has inspired plenty of scholarship about her ancestors and her collateral descendants –...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 27, 2018

Live like Jane

Jane Austen was a novelist, not an accountant, therapist, scientist, or priest. But you wouldn’t know it from the array of books...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 6, 2018

On this day in 1813. . .

Thirty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen never lived alone. From her earliest days,...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 23, 2018

On this day in 1796. . .

Thirty-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The young Jane Austen was a voracious reader. We know this...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 22, 2018

Fascinating Philadelphia

Jane Austen’s paternal aunt Philadelphia Austen Hancock (1730-92) is one of the most fascinating and understudied characters in the...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 8, 2018

On this day in 1809. . .

Thirty-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters As a novelist, Jane Austen was one of the greatest writers...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 25, 2018

Jane the MOOC-er

Janeites tend to know quite a bit about Jane Austen: her books, her characters, her family, her life and times. But hey – there’s always...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 18, 2018

Gateway to Austen's education

Few are the places with genuine Jane Austen connections. Austen’s birthplace, Steventon Rectory, was razed in the nineteenth century;...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 8, 2018

Here we go again. . .

Last month, the Washington Post drew well-earned Janeite derision when it published an article exploring the astonishing news that Jane...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 15, 2018

Christmas comes early for Janeites

People who do not write fiction often have trouble believing that novelists just, you know, make stuff up. These readers seize upon every...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 21, 2017