Sightings

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

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 4

Victory lap

Less than two weeks ago, apropos of my latest effort to stamp out the online plague of fake Jane Austen quotes, I wrote, “I like to...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 7

P&P Barbie

The summer’s biggest movie, Greta Gerwig’s delightful and touching Barbie, knows women well—really, really well. The proof? Mr. Darcy...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 3

Complications

Is Jane Austen: a) the patron saint of romantic love? or b) the avatar of hard-headed, pragmatic--even borderline-mercenary--marital...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 10

Dear diary

Let me start by pointing out that I do understand the concept of clickbait. Really, I do. But still, I’m left breathless at the moxie of...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 29

Misaligned stars

Four months ago, as blog readers will recall, I turned to the internet for reading suggestions and discovered that my Zodiac sign...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 19

Using up the leftovers

Before leaving on vacation, I always try to clean out my refrigerator—no point in coming home to sour milk and moldy vegetables. Since I...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 5

Cracking Easter eggs

Back in April, when a (supposed) first edition of Sense and Sensibility made a cameo appearance in the Apple soccer comedy Ted Lasso,...

Deborah Yaffe

May 18

Polite confusion

Titles can’t be copyrighted, but usually, this isn’t a problem: No one is likely to mistake a classic Victorian novel for a 1970s boxing...

Deborah Yaffe

May 8

Ubiquitous Austen

Back in 2004, when Margaret Sullivan launched the indispensable AustenBlog, she chose a tagline that reflected Jane Austen’s pop-culture...

Deborah Yaffe

May 4

Our robot overlords read Jane Austen

It’s a truism that the best way to improve your writing is to read the work of good writers. Apparently, this maxim holds true even for...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 30

Walk the line

It’s not every day that Jane Austen gets name-checked in a newspaper article that also mentions Tucker Carlson, Ron DeSantis, and the...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 27

Down Under Austen

Over in the opposite hemisphere of the globe, it seems, they’re reading a lot of Jane Austen. Or so we might conclude from a couple of...