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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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Souvenirs for the bookish
Halfway through this year of Austen 250 celebrations, you may be considering what sort of merch would make an appropriate souvenir of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 17
Living with a legend
Jane Austen’s House , the museum also known as Chawton cottage, is the most hallowed spot in Austen fandom: the place Jane Austen lived...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 14
Regency runway
I know very little about fashion, as my invariably pedestrian wardrobe choices make immediately clear to everyone I meet. (Who needs Elle...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 10
Clueless again?
The 1995 film Clueless is many things—a beloved teen comedy, the locus classicus for indispensable expressions like “As if!” and one of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7
Anniversary splurge
Just last month, I took issue with the travel guru Rick Steves’ questionable claim that “ Bath is the mecca for Austen devotees.” (That...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 3
Jane Austen to the rescue?
“Jane Austen's grave may save a troubled Winchester Cathedral,” the website of Religion News Service proclaimed earlier this year. And...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 30
Everyone's a fan
Discovering a fellow Janeite can be a bittersweet experience. Sometimes it’s the delightful reassurance that you’re not alone in your...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 26
On this day in 1816. . .
One hundred and second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The letter Jane Austen wrote to her 23-year-old...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 23
A festival reborn
Back in 2008, the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Louisville chapter launched a Jane Austen Festival, held over a July weekend at...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 19
Second banana no more
Ella Bruccoleri is a hard-working young British actress whose roles so far have been distinctly second banana. I’ve seen her as a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 16
Ball of the year?
Hard as we Americans try, there are some things we just can’t do as well as the British. Last month, as blog readers will recall ,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 12
P&P, Vanity Fair edition
When Pride and Prejudice was published in early 1813, Jane Austen had a few regrets. “It wants shade,” she wrote to her sister,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 9
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