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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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Not In Jane's Backyard
Between her father’s death in January 1805 and her move into Chawton cottage in July 1809, Jane Austen was . . . not homeless, certainly,...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 4, 2021
Autumn footsteps
Wandering around the English countryside in early autumn while talking about literature: sounds idyllic, no? And so I sighed enviously as...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 30, 2021
The opposite of speed reading
How long does it take to read a Jane Austen novel? At roughly three hundred pages apiece, her books are far shorter than the works of...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 27, 2021
Timeless heroine
“Mouni Roy Dresses Like A Jane Austen Heroine In Her Latest Photoshoot And Totally Nails It,” proclaimed a recent headline on the website...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 23, 2021
Pricey, and priceless
It’s always nice to know that other people value Our Jane the way we do. Like, value her in dollars. Last week, as blog readers will...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 20, 2021
On this day in 1813. . .
Sixty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Nostalgia for Jane Austen’s era has always struck me as...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 16, 2021
Austens with a pedigree
Owning first editions of Jane Austen’s novels – ideally, as I’ve noted before, of all Jane Austen’s novels – must be . . . pretty cool....
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 13, 2021
Balls in the air
Ah, the passive voice. It conceals a multitude of sins. The other day, I happened across one of my favorite genres of newspaper story:...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 9, 2021
Required reading
Last week, a British judge imposed an unusual sentence on a young man convicted of possessing terrorism-related materials. "Have you read...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 6, 2021
Forever Cher
For an actor, it must be frustrating to realize that you will be remembered almost solely for a role you played at the age of eighteen....
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 2, 2021
Quill and paper
In Sense and Sensibility, as Janeites will recall, Elinor Dashwood and her rival, Lucy Steele, spend a tense evening sparring genteelly...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 30, 2021
Un-bingeing
Unlike so many novelists of the Victorian period, Jane Austen didn’t publish her books in serial form. The first readers of, say, David...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 26, 2021
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