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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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Who's counting?
It’s fair to say that Jane Austen was a prolific letter-writer. Deirdre Le Faye, who edited the standard edition of Austen’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 1
Frank disappointment
Jane Austen seems to have adored her older brother Francis. In the handful of letters that survive from their correspondence, she...
Deborah Yaffe
May 12
What remains
Two hundred and seven years ago today, Jane Austen died in Winchester, England, at the age of forty-one. It’s easy to forget how...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 18, 2024
Noses to the grindstone
Just three weeks after Jane Austen’s House launched its much-hyped group effort to transcribe the unpublished memoir of Austen’s older...
Deborah Yaffe
May 23, 2024
Too good to check
Journalists like to joke that some stories are “too good to check”: so juicily entertaining that the last thing you want is to attempt...
Deborah Yaffe
May 13, 2024
Written by hand
Gather ‘round, children, and let me tell you about the olden days, when elders such as myself spent long hours, in school and out,...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 29, 2024
On this day in 1814. . .
Ninety-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 21, 2024
Headline magic
If you read the UK media, you might be forgiven for thinking that no story about British real estate is complete without a link to Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 8, 2024
On this day in 1806. . .
Eighty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. I’ve noted before that, as a poet, Jane Austen was a great...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 24, 2023
On this day in 1813. . .
Seventy-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Exactly 209 years ago today, Jane Austen wrote a letter...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 17, 2022
On this day in 1801. . .
Sixty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen communicated nothing particularly remarkable in...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 11, 2021
On this day in 1798. . .
Fifty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. When Jane Austen sat down to write a letter to her sister,...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 28, 2020
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