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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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Failures
As a way to make a living, writing pretty much sucks, as most writers not named James Patterson or Malcolm Gladwell can tell you. So I...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 6, 2023
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Recommended reading
In a world with so many books and so little time, reading recommendations--from critics, bloggers, celebrity talk-show hosts,...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 20, 2023
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Triggered
In my junior year of college, the assigned reading for my women’s studies class included Gloria Naylor’s 1982 novel The Women of Brewster...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 13, 2023
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Jane Austen's desk, online
The Jane Austen Summer Program, whose four-day symposium in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, combines academic study of Austen with...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 19, 2023
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Father knows best
Although Jane Austen’s novels never commanded huge print runs – the biggest, for Emma, totaled only two thousand copies -- Austen first...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 22, 2022
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Quack
As luck would have it, my family’s Thanksgiving guest list this year will once again consist of none but our four selves. And just as we...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 24, 2022
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Scary monsters
Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 31, 2022
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Lucky thirteen
Thirty-nine years ago, during my first semester of college, I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia to attend my first Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 29, 2022
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Diving deep
We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new....
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 29, 2022
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As seen by AI
Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 1, 2022
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Cue the wine and cheese
Last spring, as blog readers will recall, the London Times announced that Persuasion was the sixth most popular book on TikTok, the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 25, 2022
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#AustenTok
If you’ve ever wondered whether the shortening of our collective attention span spells doom for the appreciation of Jane Austen's...
Deborah Yaffe
May 26, 2022
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