top of page
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
Search
Making it up as you go along
I love the way the internet just makes stuff up. Kidding! I hate the way the internet just makes stuff up—not least when the stuff it...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 24, 2024
Endangered Dolphin
In December 1793, during a visit to cousins in the Hampshire city of Southampton, the soon-to-turn-eighteen-year-old Jane Austen danced...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 20, 2024
Jane Austen, partner in crime
While much Jane Austen-inspired fiction can be classed as romance, a thriving subset draws on the conventions of the mystery genre....
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 17, 2024
The Shirt, unveiled
Sometimes launching a museum exhibition is a complicated process, as catalogs are researched, international loan agreements negotiated,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 13, 2024
Gotcha!
One of the pleasures of life as a pedantic Janeite killjoy is the opportunity to call out minor--yet vexing!--Austen-related errors...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 10, 2024
Acquired taste
Mansfield Park’s status as the most polarizing of Jane Austen’s novels is by now well-established. It’s the black-olives-and-anchovy...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 6, 2024
Bolt from the blue
Does Jane Austen owe her fame to an excellent publicist? The legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein says yes—or at least maybe—in a recent LitHub...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 3, 2024
Craving the misery
Five years ago, the British journalist Tanya Gold wrote a whole article about how much she dislikes Jane Austen. Now, in an article about...
Deborah Yaffe
May 30, 2024
Wondering about Alice
Chawton House, the Elizabethan mansion once owned by Jane Austen’s older brother Edward, has worked hard to transform itself from a...
Deborah Yaffe
May 27, 2024
Noses to the grindstone
Just three weeks after Jane Austen’s House launched its much-hyped group effort to transcribe the unpublished memoir of Austen’s older...
Deborah Yaffe
May 23, 2024
On this day in 1813. . .
Ninety-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Only about two years of Jane Austen’s childhood were spent...
Deborah Yaffe
May 20, 2024
Mad about the Regency
The third season of Bridgerton, Netflix’s smash-hit Regency romance series, launches today. To mark the occasion, a professor at...
Deborah Yaffe
May 16, 2024
bottom of page