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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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Ball of the year?
Hard as we Americans try, there are some things we just can’t do as well as the British.  Last month, as blog readers will recall ,...
Deborah Yaffe
5 days ago
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Where Rick reigns
Over the past couple of years, my husband and I have become fans of the travel maven Rick Steves , whose lucid and well-organized...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 2
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Regency playdate
Exactly 250 years ago, England saw the birth of a great artist whose innovations forever changed our culture. Â I speak, of course, of...
Deborah Yaffe
May 1
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A wrecking ball for Ashe Park House
The material traces of Jane Austen’s life are so scarce that devoted Janeites—or people seeking to profit off Janeite devotion--tend to...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 10
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On foot, part II
If you missed the Autumn Walking Festival in Alton, England , next door to the Hampshire village where Jane Austen spent the last eight...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 13
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Contested ground
Jane Austen was a country girl, raised in a rural enclave of Hampshire, England, where the houses she lived in and the churches she...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 20
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Oh, the places you'll go
Nobody has to tell us Janeites that 2025—aka the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth—is a special year to visit Austen sites in the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 16
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Celebration, by any name
A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2
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Rank order
Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England—her home for the last eight years of her life, and the place where she wrote or revised all six...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 12, 2024
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Jane Austen's fingerprints
In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s....
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 9, 2024
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Sacred space
Jane Austen breathed her last on July 18, 1817, in rented rooms at 8 College Street in the English cathedral city of Winchester. For...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 14, 2024
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On foot
Jane Austen’s heroines do a lot of walking. Elizabeth Bennet strides purposefully from Longbourn to Netherfield, muddying her petticoat...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 14, 2024
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