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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 Shirt, unveiled
Sometimes launching a museum exhibition is a complicated process, as catalogs are researched, international loan agreements negotiated,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 13, 2024
Embroidering Chawton
The last time I completed a significant piece of needlework (see below) was during the early months of pandemic quarantine, when being...
Deborah Yaffe
May 2, 2024
In the mind's eye
Jane Austen’s physical descriptions of her characters are famously sparse. But if you ask me, Anne Elliot, Emma Woodhouse, and Elizabeth...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 23, 2023
Treasure chest
Chawton House, the Elizabethan mansion in Hampshire once owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward, is one of the treasures of the Janeite...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 2, 2023
Semi-native daughter
Jane Austen’s stays in the southern English port of Southampton were short-ish and not especially happy. As a seven-year-old, she...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 20, 2023
Bonnetfest closeup
If you’re a Janeite who can’t make it to Cincinnati’s Taft Museum of Art this summer – and will therefore miss your chance for an...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 9, 2022
Bonnetfest
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – in other words, in mid-2019 -- I wrote about a traveling exhibition of costumes from Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 17, 2022
In lieu of a pear tree
It’s a tough year for traditional Christmas celebrations. The eight maids are a-milking in masks. The ten lords are a-leaping six feet...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 3, 2020
Chawton cottage panorama
Pandemic life has made clear, at least to me, that online interactions are no substitute for the in-real-life kind. Still, it’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 26, 2020
Oh, those clothes. .
The success of the screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels has been attributed to many factors: romantic plots, attractive stars,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 8, 2019
More reasons to visit Chawton
The most beloved Austen site in England -- Jane Austen’s House Museum, aka Chawton Cottage, the Hampshire home where Austen wrote or...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 1, 2018
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 18, 2017
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