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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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The price of Austen tourism
Last summer, not long after the July 18 bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, officials in the English town of Basingstoke announced that...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 22, 2018
Janeite in residence
They crop up regularly, those Janeite dream jobs. We read the announcements, and we think how lovely it would be to spend hours...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 15, 2018
Rebranding Chawton House
Nobody called it branding in Jane Austen’s day, although Lord Byron, at least, was an expert practitioner of the craft avant la lettre ....
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 5, 2018
Good news (at last!) for Chawton House
The past year’s drama at Chawton House Library has sometimes seemed more appropriate to one of the Gothic romances Jane Austen satirized...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 4, 2017
Herding sheep
Somewhere out there, lost lambs are baa-ing to return to the fold, and a group of scholarly Bo Peeps is ready to shepherd them home. The...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 25, 2017
SOS for Chawton's horses
Although the Shire horses of Chawton House Library have been dispersed to new homes, the local campaign to reverse that decision...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 1, 2017
Chawton Kremlinology
The ongoing saga of Chawton House Library’s beloved Shire horses – likely casualties of the Austen site’s cost-cutting campaign – is...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 17, 2017
Goodbye to Chawton's horses
When Silicon Valley multimillionaire Sandy Lerner opened Chawton House Library in 2003, the new Janeite landmark in Hampshire, England,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 6, 2017
The Austen ice bucket challenge
There are many things I would be willing to do to secure the future of Chawton House Library, one of the Austen world’s great treasures....
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 19, 2017
Holiday break in Austen country
Any plans late next month? No? Then head over to the web site of Jane Austen 200 – the clearinghouse for events scheduled this year in...
Deborah Yaffe
May 28, 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
On the trail of great writers
Logically, there’s no particular reason we dedicated readers should yearn to visit the houses where our favorite writers were born, grew...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 9, 2017
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