Places 6/17

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

Autumn footsteps

Wandering around the English countryside in early autumn while talking about literature: sounds idyllic, no? And so I sighed enviously as...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 30, 2021

Balls in the air

Ah, the passive voice. It conceals a multitude of sins. The other day, I happened across one of my favorite genres of newspaper story:...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 9, 2021

Silt and sensibility

As we Pride and Prejudice readers know, Mr. Darcy’s responsible stewardship of his beautiful grounds at Pemberley is an important factor...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 16, 2021

Road trip

If you’re a bit stir-crazy after fifteen months’ home confinement, the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain has a suggestion for you: drive...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 3, 2021

Austen-linked fixer-upper

By now, I’m used to reading real estate listings that hype every tiniest link to Jane Austen: An oast house on a farm where her father...

Deborah Yaffe

May 27, 2021

Interrogating an interrogation

Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...

Deborah Yaffe

May 6, 2021

Upstairs, downstairs

When Keira Knightley was cast as Elizabeth Bennet in the 2005 feature film of Pride and Prejudice, she worried that her performance would...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 26, 2021

Jane Austen wrote here?

If you spend a lot of time online, it can sometimes seem that every house for sale in England has a tangential Jane Austen connection...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 18, 2021

Three weeks, three books (or is it four?)

Jane Austen sightings are like buses: Sometimes, you don’t get one for ages, and sometimes, they come in bunches. These last few weeks...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 22, 2021

Recovering a literary Holy Grail

It’s been more than three years since a trio of passionate Janeites formed the Godmersham Lost Sheep Society (GLOSS), an organization...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 7, 2021

Goodbye at last, 2020

A year ago, I confidently predicted a 2020 filled with the usual array of Austen events: “Teas, balls, fairs, festivals, conferences,...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 31, 2020

Our cousins' street

Many Janeites lack an intimate familiarity with the geography of class in Regency England; we – by which I mean I – can’t tell our Edward...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 10, 2020