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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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Longbourn for sale
No one reads Pride and Prejudice and dreams of living at Longbourn. The Bennet family estate, much as Mr. Collins may praise it, is so...
Deborah Yaffe
May 24, 2017
On this day in 1817. . .
Twenty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. By May 1817, Jane Austen was gravely ill, just surfacing...
Deborah Yaffe
May 21, 2017
Tragic forty-one
Forty-one is a tragic number for Janeites – the all-too-young age at which Jane Austen left this world exactly two centuries ago, at the...
Deborah Yaffe
May 17, 2017
Sometimes folly is folly
“To put it bluntly, he was screwing her.” It’s not every day that my Jane Austen Google alert yields a line like that. Especially when...
Deborah Yaffe
May 14, 2017
Stealing Home?
In Austen studies, originality is hard to come by. The primary sources – novels, letters, family reminiscences, unfinished work – are...
Deborah Yaffe
May 10, 2017
Book covers
Jane Austen and sex: By now, you’ve heard all the arguments. 1. She’s a sex-free zone, where female modesty and male decorum are prized...
Deborah Yaffe
May 7, 2017
Jane Austen meets Texas debs
The year advances apace, and yet there still doesn’t seem to be a release date for the supposed-to-come-out-in-2017 film adaptation of...
Deborah Yaffe
May 3, 2017
Jane lies in Winchester
Now that this Austen bicentenary year is in full swing, the announcements of commemorative events pegged to the July 18 anniversary of...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 30, 2017
Refighting the winning battle
Barely is the metaphorical ink dry on my recent blog post lamenting all the great UK Jane Austen bicentenary events that we American...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 26, 2017
Debuting the Austen tenner
Jane Austen spent years living in straitened circumstances and earned only modest sums from her work, completely missing the giant...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 23, 2017
A fiver to Bath
The Roald Dahl-flavored tale of the four specially engraved, possibly valuable Jane Austen £5 notes continues to be The Story That Will...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 19, 2017
Bicentenary envy
The year 2017 brings two severe trials for American Janeites. The first is our inevitable sadness at marking the bicentenary of Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 16, 2017
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