Austen's not-so-secret London
The biographical record suggests that Jane Austen was essentially a country girl, much happier during the many years she spent in rural...
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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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Deborah Yaffe
- Jul 27
Summer fun
Chawton House, the Elizabethan mansion in Hampshire, England, once owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Austen Knight, has had a busy...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 12
Edward Knight, publican?
Edward Knight, Jane Austen’s third-oldest brother, was a husband, a father, a landowner, and the man who provided one of England’s...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 22
Listening pleasure
It’s been a sadly long time since I strolled through the garden at Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 11
Trouble at Lyme
Mr. Darcy, aka Colin Firth, is riding a white horse when he comes home to Pemberley, aka Lyme Park, in the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation...
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 17
Jeopardy and peril at Chawton House
Twenty years ago this summer, American tech mogul and Janeite Sandy Lerner finished up her multimillion-dollar restoration of an...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 20
Bait and switch?
“Jane Austen’s Birthplace Hits the Market”! “Your chance to live in the beloved author’s treasured family home”! When these headlines...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 2
Phone books
Back in 2017, Jane Austen’s birthplace, the Hampshire village of Steventon, marked the bicentennial of her death by converting a disused...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 2
Better luck this time?
Nearly five years ago, a Canadian lawyer named Tara Rout floated the notion of buying Luckington Court, the UK mansion that played...
Deborah Yaffe
- Dec 8, 2022
At your service
When you shell out $250 to $450 for a night in a university town’s boutique hotel, what amenities do you expect to get for your money?...
Deborah Yaffe
- Aug 15, 2022
Sale in Aisle A
Attention, bargain hunters! Five years ago, you would have needed £9 million (about $11 million) to buy Luckington Court, the Cotswolds...
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