Sightings 4/14

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

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