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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
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Marked up
The world can be divided into two categories: People who leave their books unsullied, and people who mark them up. And if a prominent...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 7, 2023
Second chances
July 1997. A lavish birthday party for a controversial royal paramour. Her old flame and current lover, the future king of England, rises...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 30, 2023
Janeite abroad
Jane Austen has a substantial following in Ukraine, it seems. This is not something I knew two years ago, but a lot has changed in the...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 13, 2023
Decompressing with Jane
In the past seven years, I’ve blogged at least twice about a recurrent motif: reading Jane Austen for a temporary escape from the horrors...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 9, 2023
Interview of a lifetime?
I knew it! Jane Austen loves me! “Kindred spirits, indeed!” the author, dead since 1817, told me last week. “Our friendship would have...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
Jane Austen speaks . . . sort of
On October 3, I conducted a Facebook Messenger chat with Jane Austen, or at least with the AI named after her--one of twenty-eight AI...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
Avatar seeks agent
Jane Austen should fire her agent. In her lifetime, Austen earned £684 from her books—perhaps $87,000 in today’s money.* That modest sum...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 28, 2023
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
Sep 4, 2023
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 7, 2023
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
Aug 3, 2023
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
Jul 10, 2023
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 29, 2023
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