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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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Sacred space
Jane Austen breathed her last on July 18, 1817, in rented rooms at 8 College Street in the English cathedral city of Winchester. For...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 14, 2024
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
Austenian medical mystery
Jane Austen’s death is tragic, because she died at only forty-one, at the height of her artistic powers. It’s also mysterious – the...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 5, 2021
On this day in 1817. . .
Fifty-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. I recently finished reading my eighth biography of Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
May 27, 2020
On this day in 1817. . .
Forty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In May of 1817, the gravely ill Jane Austen left her home...
Deborah Yaffe
May 26, 2019
On this day in 1817. . .
Forty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Only hindsight makes anything remarkable out of the letter...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 24, 2019
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
Benefits for Basingstoke
Jane Austen was never squeamish about money-making. In a November 1814 letter to her niece Fanny Knight (#114 in Deirdre Le Faye’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 23, 2017
Six books
Tomorrow marks the anniversary that we all – or, at least, all those of us who are Janeites – have been waiting for since 2017 dawned:...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 16, 2017
Austen laurels
D-Day for Janeites – aka July 18, the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s untimely death – is approaching quickly, and a number of UK outlets...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 5, 2017
Coins and benches
Last fall, you’ll recall, the English town of Basingstoke, located not far from Jane Austen’s final home at Chawton, decided to...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 25, 2017
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 17, 2017
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