Chawton House | DeborahYaffe.com 4/5

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

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

Lerner leaves Chawton House

Unless Queen Elizabeth II is a secret Austen fan, the richest living Janeite is probably Sandy Lerner, the co-founder of Cisco Systems...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 7, 2016