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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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Cue the wine and cheese
Last spring, as blog readers will recall, the London Times announced that Persuasion was the sixth most popular book on TikTok, the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 25, 2022
Something to talk about
Google the Omniscient doesn’t seem to know if it was Henry Ford, P.T. Barnum, or somebody else entirely who first declared, “I don’t care...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 21, 2022
In praise of repression
Early on in Netflix’s polarizing new adaptation of Persuasion, Anne Elliot leafs through a scrapbook in which she has preserved accounts...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 18, 2022
On this day(ish) in 1814. . .
Seventy-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The letter-writing culture of Jane Austen’s day was...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 14, 2022
Janeites in conversation
“It is such a happiness when good people get together--and they always do,” Miss Bates exults in chapter 21 of Emma. In context, she is...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 11, 2022
Damage control
You’re a couple of weeks away from premiering your new movie. Your core audience has been vacuuming up every scrap of news about the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7, 2022
The computer-generated Jane Austen
It’s Independence Day here in the United States. What better occasion to consider the question of how soon our computer overlords will...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 4, 2022
Feeding the beast
The appetite for Jane Austen-adjacent content never seems to flag, at least in the Anglophiliac precincts of PBS. If you ate up Season...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 30, 2022
That trailer
During an overseas visit earlier this month, I was too swamped with family business to follow the news with my usual attention. This...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 27, 2022
Regency striptease
When I was a kid, I – or perhaps my sister -- owned a novelty pen bearing an image of Botticelli’s Venus in a bathing suit. (Or was it a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 23, 2022
She plays well at the palace
Seven years ago, we learned that Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall – aka the wife of Prince Charles and future queen consort of England – is a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 20, 2022
Putting down roots
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, as Britain’s Queen Victoria marked a milestone sixty years on the throne, the proprietors of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 16, 2022
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