Jane Austen's House | 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

Gifts

My husband was sure there would be no gift shop at 8 College Street , the Winchester house where Jane Austen died, and which opened to...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 21

Living with a legend

Jane Austen’s House , the museum also known as Chawton cottage, is the most hallowed spot in Austen fandom: the place Jane Austen lived...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 14

A lively celebration

Fifty years ago, the ardent Janeite collector Alberta Burke--whose husband, Henry, would go on to co-found the Jane Austen Society of...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 5

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

The other talented Austen sister

Cassandra Austen’s family considered her a skilled artist, but for most Janeites, her claim to artistic fame rests, uneasily, on a single...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 28

Back in the day

I still remember the first time I watched the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . At the time, my husband and I lived...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 30

Contested ground

Jane Austen was a country girl, raised in a rural enclave of Hampshire, England, where the houses she lived in and the churches she...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 20

Celebration, by any name

A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 2

Rank order

Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England—her home for the last eight years of her life, and the place where she wrote or revised all six...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 12, 2024

Jane Austen's fingerprints

In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s....

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 9, 2024

Center of celebration

If next year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth has an epicenter, it would surely be Jane Austen’s House , the...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 24, 2024

On foot

Jane Austen’s heroines do a lot of walking. Elizabeth Bennet strides purposefully from Longbourn to Netherfield, muddying her petticoat...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 14, 2024