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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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Austen connections
At this point in Jane Austen’s career of pop-culture celebrity, it’s no surprise that every place with even a tangential connection to...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 3, 2018
Missing pieces
From time to time, you happen across a story that makes clear how entirely some people miss the point of Jane Austen. For instance, when...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 15, 2018
In Edward's library
In September 1813, Jane Austen wrote to her sister, Cassandra, from their brother Edward’s library at Godmersham Park in Kent. As regular...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 21, 2018
From PhD to CEO
The transformation of Chawton House from purely academic destination into full-service Janeite tourist draw continues: The stately home...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 14, 2018
Mismatch
Jane Austen’s novels are filled with marital mismatches. Clever, sardonic Mr. Bennet treats Mrs. Bennet with thinly veiled disrespect. In...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 30, 2018
Naked(-ish) in Bath
Poor never-married Jane Austen: Lacking nuptials, she never got a bachelorette party, either. Strange, then – not to say strangely...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 9, 2018
Jane Austen in Hampstead
For sale: four-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot house that -- as the long-time residence of Elizabeth Jenkins, Jane Austen’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 5, 2018
Retracing Louisa's steps
Jane Austen’s characters and situations feel so real to us that it’s easy to overlook the fact that many of her stories are set in...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 26, 2018
The price of Austen tourism
Last summer, not long after the July 18 bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, officials in the English town of Basingstoke announced that...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 22, 2018
A statue for Chawton
The Hampshire village of Chawton is the mecca of the Janeite faith: the community where Austen spent the last eight years of her life,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 20, 2018
Ready for its closeups
A couple of months ago, when Jane Austen’s House Museum unveiled the results of the collaborative quilting project it organized to...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 17, 2018
Austenland for real?
Over the years, I’ve swooned about Austen-linked real estate coming up for sale or rent. Perhaps I have said things like, “If money were...
Deborah Yaffe
May 16, 2018
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