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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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Snooze
People who hate Jane Austen – yes, such benighted folks do exist – sometimes claim that she is so-o-o boring that she causes eyelids to...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 17, 2022
The pendulum swings
The smashing success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has ushered in a new era of multiracial casting in Regency costume dramas. This is good...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 13, 2022
Expensive thrills
For Janeites, the Austen First Edition Thrill-o-Meter is calibrated something like this: Biggest Thrill: Austen novel first edition owned...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 10, 2022
Ahead of his time
Janeites first discover Jane Austen at different moments in their lives. I’ve talked with people who read her first in a high school or...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 6, 2022
The Austen MBA
We all read Jane Austen for different reasons. (I wrote a whole book about this phenomenon.) Some read her for the lucidity of her...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 3, 2022
Lucky thirteen
Thirty-nine years ago, during my first semester of college, I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia to attend my first Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 29, 2022
Ensembles
Over the summer, when Janeites weren’t arguing about the controversial new Netflix adaptation of Persuasion, many were praising the...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 26, 2022
A milestone farewell
MGM’s 1940 movie of Pride and Prejudice was the first screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and with its Victorian fashions,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 22, 2022
Reading Austen in high places
A few months ago, I noted that the British royal family appears to include a critical mass of women who are crazy about Jane Austen. (Or...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 19, 2022
Broadening the collection
The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 15, 2022
Jane Austen in love . . . maybe
Nine months have passed since we learned the happy news that a cache of priceless books and manuscripts, including two Jane Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 12, 2022
Laying the table
From time to time, a particular news item brings a snippet of Jane Austen’s wisdom forcibly to mind – such a snippet as, say, “One half...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 8, 2022
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