Places 10/17

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

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

The beautiful grounds at Pemberley

By now, pretty much every Janeite in the known universe has seen the moment in the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice...

Deborah Yaffe

May 13, 2018