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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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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
Where Rick reigns
Over the past couple of years, my husband and I have become fans of the travel maven Rick Steves , whose lucid and well-organized...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 2
Celebration, by any name
A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2
On this day in 1801. . .
Eighty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In January 1801, the twenty-five-year-old Jane Austen was...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 9, 2023
On this day in 1801. . .
Seventy-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. How autobiographical is Jane Austen’s writing? Impossible...
Deborah Yaffe
May 12, 2022
Vows
It’s a hopeless task -- the effort to convince casual fans that Jane Austen isn’t really the patron saint of weddings. No matter how...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 17, 2022
On this day in 1801. . .
Seventy-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Moving out of one house and into another is a stressful,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 3, 2022
Our cousins' street
Many Janeites lack an intimate familiarity with the geography of class in Regency England; we – by which I mean I – can’t tell our Edward...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 10, 2020
Statues, statues everywhere
Remember back in elementary school, when one kid would get an awesome new toy or a cool pair of shoes, and then everybody had to have...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 4, 2019
Ghosts
The voracious interest in all things Jane Austen has inspired plenty of scholarship about her ancestors and her collateral descendants –...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 27, 2018
Naked(-ish) in Bath
Poor never-married Jane Austen: Lacking nuptials, she never got a bachelorette party, either. Strange, then – not to say strangely...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 10, 2018
A very (expensive) Jane Austen Christmas
If you are a Janeite with no 2016 Christmas plans – and a whole wad of cash left over from this year’s gift shopping – the New York Times...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 23, 2015
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