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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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Taking refuge in Austen
Six years ago, when I heard about a young Syrian woman reading Jane Austen while enduring the bombing of Aleppo, I saw the story as a...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 21, 2022
Laying the table
From time to time, a particular news item brings a snippet of Jane Austen’s wisdom forcibly to mind – such a snippet as, say, “One half...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 8, 2022
Aging out
Last week, a beautiful young woman ended her longstanding romantic relationship with a good-looking guy old enough to be her father. Or...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 5, 2022
Jane Austen triage
The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice turns up everywhere, most commonly a) when a journalist who doesn’t know much about Jane Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 25, 2022
The computer-generated Jane Austen
It’s Independence Day here in the United States. What better occasion to consider the question of how soon our computer overlords will...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 4, 2022
High stakes, low stakes
In Jane Austen’s novels, the stakes of the courtship game could hardly be higher: Her heroines face irrevocable decisions that will...
Deborah Yaffe
May 30, 2022
Sticker shock
Apparently, it’s not just gas and hotel rooms: Pandemic-era inflation has also hit the rare book market. Or so we learned from a recent...
Deborah Yaffe
May 19, 2022
While the bombs fall
Back in 2016, the BBC interviewed a young Syrian woman sheltering at home during the government’s brutal bombing of the city of Aleppo....
Deborah Yaffe
May 5, 2022
Love hurts
The sting of rejection is an emotion whose nuances Jane Austen understood well – whether the agony of the jilted Marianne Dashwood (“Good...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 24, 2022
Of castles and chakras
When NBC announced last month that it had changed the name of its new Regency-themed dating show from Pride and Prejudice: An Experiment...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 7, 2022
Courtin' time
Finally, NBC has released a trailer for The Courtship, the upcoming reality-TV show featuring Austen-era costumes and dating rituals, and...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 21, 2022
Break out the popcorn
March is shaping up to be a big month for Janeites who like Austen-related TV and aren’t too picky about its relationship to anything...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 7, 2022
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