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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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Aging out
Last week, a beautiful young woman ended her longstanding romantic relationship with a good-looking guy old enough to be her father. Or...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 5, 2022
On this day in 1796. . .
Seventy-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In December of 1775, the Rev. George Austen wrote to a...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 1, 2022
Diving deep
We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new....
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 29, 2022
Jane Austen triage
The first sentence of Pride and Prejudice turns up everywhere, most commonly a) when a journalist who doesn’t know much about Jane Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 25, 2022
Thin gruel
Early last Tuesday morning, I opened up my phone to Wordle, the now-famous daily word-finding puzzle, and typed my usual starting guess:...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 22, 2022
On this day in 1814. . .
Seventy-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. “Write what you know,” aspiring authors are counseled in...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 18, 2022
Sale in Aisle A
Attention, bargain hunters! Five years ago, you would have needed £9 million (about $11 million) to buy Luckington Court, the Cotswolds...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 15, 2022
Still talking
It’s never a bad time to talk about Persuasion–really, what are you doing that’s more important?--but right now may be an especially good...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 11, 2022
Family letters
As we Janeites know to our sorrow, only 160 of Jane Austen’s letters survive, and some of those are filled with details that mean little...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 8, 2022
A surfeit of sequels
Jane Austen never wrote a sequel. Among her many excellent qualities was a sure sense of when to leave well enough alone. Alas, too many...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 4, 2022
As seen by AI
Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 1, 2022
In the stars
Jane Austen was a Sagittarius. Would she have cared? Or, as a clergyman’s daughter and a pious Anglican, would she have rejected the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 28, 2022
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