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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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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
2
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
0
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
5
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
0
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
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
6
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
2
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
0
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
0
Plain and ornamental
In his 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen , the author’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, reports that his famous aunt “was successful in...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 10, 2024
0
Creepy Lizzy
The newest Lizzy Bennet is a peculiar creature. True, her Regency-appropriate curls are lovely, and her dark eyes might pass for fine,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 23, 2024
2
Acquired taste
Mansfield Park’s status as the most polarizing of Jane Austen’s novels is by now well-established. It’s the black-olives-and-anchovy...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 6, 2024
0
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