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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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Regency reality
For some Janeites, fandom entails an intense engagement with the material details of Austen’s world. These Janeites are the people who...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 28, 2022
Quack
As luck would have it, my family’s Thanksgiving guest list this year will once again consist of none but our four selves. And just as we...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 24, 2022
Taking refuge in Austen
Six years ago, when I heard about a young Syrian woman reading Jane Austen while enduring the bombing of Aleppo, I saw the story as a...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 21, 2022
Not so timeless
As regular blog readers know, among my favorite pastimes is mocking the internet for its habit of attributing quotations from screen...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 17, 2022
Passages
The years 1995-96 yielded a bumper crop of filmed versions of Jane Austen’s novels, designed for both big and small screens. The...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 14, 2022
Baby Dionne
Last year, Alicia Silverstone got on TikTok and promptly started turning out Clueless-themed videos featuring her ten-year-old son. Now...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 10, 2022
Slush
Today, it’s called the slush pile: the tottering heap of unsolicited manuscripts that clog the mailboxes—these days, the email boxes—of...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 7, 2022
On this day in 1813. . .
Eighty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Sometimes you read a famous author’s correspondence and...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 3, 2022
Scary monsters
Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 31, 2022
Read all about it
Like most writers, Jane Austen was a reader, avidly consuming the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose of her day. Her letters offer...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 27, 2022
On this day in 1798. . .
Eightieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Nowadays, an unpublished writer can upload her...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 24, 2022
Drinking game
This fall and winter, every Janeite workweek starts with “Austen Monday”—the evening on which the Rosenbach, Philadelphia’s museum and...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 20, 2022
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