Places 2/17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plain and ornamental

In his 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen , the author’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, reports that his famous aunt “was successful in...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 10, 2024

Pilgrimage sites

In case you’re looking for another stop on your Jane Austen 250th Birthday Pilgrimage, a church where she once worshiped recently...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 3, 2024

Austen-linked teardown

Let us contemplate, for a moment, the kind of wealth that allows you to spend some £17 million ($22.8 million) on a palatial second home...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 30, 2024

Regency roses

I’ve never paid particular attention to flowers in Jane Austen’s novels, but apparently, someone else has been taking note: Earlier this...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 26, 2024

R.I.P. Quackers

Let me say up front that I understand that the death of a beloved pet—like the death of a newborn baby --is no laughing matter. And yet,...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 9, 2024

Approved

It’s coming up on chain-yourself-to-the-bulldozers time for the vocal—but possibly small—band of folks opposed to the erection of a Jane...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 12, 2024