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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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Too good to check
Journalists like to joke that some stories are “too good to check”: so juicily entertaining that the last thing you want is to attempt...
Deborah Yaffe
May 13, 2024
Growth spurt
Back in the 2010s, when I first started reading Jane Austen fanfic, the typical example of the genre was a romance novel, either Regency...
Deborah Yaffe
May 9, 2024
Seven paragraphs to read if you want to
I should probably spend less time thinking about stupid clickbait listicles that mention Jane Austen. My mental health would improve. My...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2024
Embroidering Chawton
The last time I completed a significant piece of needlework (see below) was during the early months of pandemic quarantine, when being...
Deborah Yaffe
May 2, 2024
Written by hand
Gather ‘round, children, and let me tell you about the olden days, when elders such as myself spent long hours, in school and out,...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 29, 2024
Happy (early) anniversary
The years 2011-2018 saw a host of important Jane Austen bicentenaries, both happy and sad --the 200th anniversaries of the publications...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 25, 2024
Snooze
Earlier this year, I had the occasion (read: an excuse) to rewatch several of the feature-film adaptations of Emma. I reconfirmed the...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 22, 2024
Playing around
For certain kinds of Janeites, nothing beats dressing up in Regency costume and—to paraphrase Mr. Bennet—exposing themselves in some...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 18, 2024
Not In Jane's Backyard, Part II
Jane Austen died without finishing Sanditon , her novel about a developer trying to turn a sleepy small town into a bustling seaside...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 15, 2024
Not so historical
Jane Austen’s novels make it onto a lot of best-of lists, and I am usually happy when they do. But not last month, when both Pride and...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 11, 2024
Pemberley-at-sea
Although Jane Austen never set sail, her ties to seafaring, forged through the experiences of her two sailor brothers, were close and...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 8, 2024
Statue wars
The controversy over Winchester Cathedral’s proposed Jane Austen statue is truly the gift that keeps on giving, at least for those of us...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 4, 2024
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