top of page
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
Search
Holiday break in Austen country
Any plans late next month? No? Then head over to the web site of Jane Austen 200 – the clearinghouse for events scheduled this year in...
Deborah Yaffe
May 28, 2017
Longbourn for sale
No one reads Pride and Prejudice and dreams of living at Longbourn. The Bennet family estate, much as Mr. Collins may praise it, is so...
Deborah Yaffe
May 24, 2017
Tragic forty-one
Forty-one is a tragic number for Janeites – the all-too-young age at which Jane Austen left this world exactly two centuries ago, at the...
Deborah Yaffe
May 17, 2017
Jane lies in Winchester
Now that this Austen bicentenary year is in full swing, the announcements of commemorative events pegged to the July 18 anniversary of...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 30, 2017
A fiver to Bath
The Roald Dahl-flavored tale of the four specially engraved, possibly valuable Jane Austen £5 notes continues to be The Story That Will...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 19, 2017
Jane Austen, trumped
For an American, a British spouse confers certain advantages. Your tea will always be expertly brewed. Your friends will find the accent...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 26, 2017
On the trail of great writers
Logically, there’s no particular reason we dedicated readers should yearn to visit the houses where our favorite writers were born, grew...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 9, 2017
Floor-to-ceiling Austen
The curators of Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton are hard at work freshening the place up for this year’s commemoration of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 2, 2017
Bronzing Austen
Nobody knows what Jane Austen looked like. Nobody will ever know what Jane Austen looked like. So, naturally, we’ll soon have a new image...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 23, 2017
Jane Austen, citizen of the world
Jane Austen is often seen as quintessentially English, in her portraits of a rural middle-class life dominated by the gentry and the...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 22, 2016
Miss Bates, vindicated
Miss Bates has an optimistic outlook on life (“It is such a happiness when good people get together -- and they always do”) but not...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 12, 2016
Jane's fundraising
As every homeowner knows, the passage of time can wreak havoc on even the best-constructed building. Paint peels, window frames warp,...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 8, 2016
bottom of page