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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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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
The price of perfection
I was born with a completist gene. I like to finish things up – books, TV series, leftovers. I like to own full sets of things. I abhor...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 13, 2020
Lovebites
Making a mistake in print, and being forced to acknowledge it publicly in the corrections column: It’s every journalist’s nightmare. And...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 6, 2020
Midwinter diversion
“I have just learnt to love a hyacinth.” “. . . . So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 20, 2020
Family dinner
As we sit down to our turkey tonight, perhaps in company with relatives or acquaintances whom we carefully avoid the rest of the year,...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 28, 2019
Riding high
By now, Jane Austen has made so many top-novel lists that it’s hard to come up with anything new to say when she makes yet another one....
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 11, 2019
Liar, liar
In David Lodge’s classic 1975 academic novel Changing Places, the English-professor characters discuss a game of intellectual chicken...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2019
On this day in 1814. . .
Forty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s letters, with their unpolished emphasis on...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 8, 2019
Austen's pewter
Jane Austen, her brother Henry would have us believe, didn’t care about making money. “She became an authoress entirely from taste and...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 11, 2019
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