Edward Austen Knight | DeborahYaffe.com

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

On this day in 1808. . .

One hundred and fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen, it seems, took a rather jaundiced...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 2, 2025

Ninety-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Mary Lloyd was a friend of Jane and Cassandra Austen...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 2, 2024

Ninety-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Janeites do not always take Jane Austen at her word when it...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 7, 2024

Ninety-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. A curious—and curiously contemporary--passage appears in the...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 25, 2024

Eighty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Novelists are a ruthless bunch. They find grist for their...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 16, 2023

Eighty-eighth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. The British have a well-documented penchant for discussing...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 18, 2023

Edward Knight, Jane Austen’s third-oldest brother, was a husband, a father, a landowner, and the man who provided one of England’s...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 12, 2023

Eighty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s traditional to envision Jane Austen as a homebody, and...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 20, 2023

Eighty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Sometimes you read a famous author’s correspondence and...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 3, 2022