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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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Data storage, the Jane Austen way
Anyone whose college papers reside on now-unreadable floppy disks has probably wondered whether the human race is on the brink of an...
Deborah Yaffe
May 13, 2021
Interrogating an interrogation
Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2021
Cross-channel connections
Jane Austen is usually thought of as a quintessentially English writer, what with all those landed estates, rural rectories, and mannerly...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 15, 2021
On this day in 1816. . .
Sixty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. From time to time, you will hear writers claim that they...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 1, 2021
Sauce for the goose
Like many of us in the Age of COVID, I’ll be hosting an unusually small Thanksgiving party tonight – just the four members of my...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 26, 2020
On this day in 1815. . .
Fifty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Although Jane Austen was a professional writer who spent six...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 23, 2020
Another chance at completion
Less than a year ago, a rich person with excellent taste snapped up a complete set of Jane Austen first editions at a New York auction....
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 12, 2020
Pandemic project
Back in March, a trio of young British academics decided to counteract the loneliness and isolation of lockdown by producing a series of...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 21, 2020
Breaking news!
Mark your calendars, Janeites! The day we’ve barely dared to imagine in our most fervid fantasies is nearly here! On October 28, we’ll...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 30, 2020
Beautiful books, glamorous provenance
When valuable editions of Jane Austen’s novels come up for auction, the selling point is usually something about the books themselves:...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 9, 2020
AKA
Did Jane Austen want the world to know her name? It’s a complicated question. In January 1796, in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, the...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 23, 2020
Austen math
Remind me: How many novels did Jane Austen write, again? Just kidding! Yes, of course, the answer is six. But if you didn’t know that...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 12, 2020
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