Work 6/16

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

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

Listen up

Nothing beats hearing a soothing, familiar voice read an engrossing story aloud. I loved the read-aloud experience when I was a child...

Deborah Yaffe

May 20, 2020

On this day in 1811. . .

Fifty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Some years ago, as I was finishing up Among the Janeites, I...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 29, 2020

Feverish

No one in Jane Austen’s novels becomes infected with a coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean she has nothing to say on the subject that now...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 15, 2020

Completist completes

Apparently, I’m not the only Jane Austen completist out there. Last week, as blog readers will recall, the New York auction house Swann...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 27, 2020