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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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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
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
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
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Just three weeks after Jane Austen’s House launched its much-hyped group effort to transcribe the unpublished memoir of Austen’s older...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
Not In Jane's Backyard, Part II
Jane Austen died without finishing Sanditon , her novel about a developer trying to turn a sleepy small town into a bustling seaside...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 15, 2024
The sounds of Jane Austen Christmas
Emma Woodhouse’s Christmas holiday is not a good one, as readers of Emma will recall: On Christmas Eve, she fends off Mr. Elton’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 21, 2023
Wallpapering
My husband, an aspiring rock god, owns a T-shirt reading, “How many guitars do I really need? Just one more.” Many Janeites harbor...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 14, 2023
Podlife
The universe of Jane Austen podcasts is hardly underpopulated. You can choose from titles like AustenTherapy, Bonnets at Dawn, First...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 13, 2023
How P&P came to be
It’s a great time for programming at Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen wrote or revised all six of her...
Deborah Yaffe
May 25, 2023
Listening pleasure
It’s been a sadly long time since I strolled through the garden at Jane Austen’s House, the cottage in Chawton, Hampshire, where Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
May 22, 2023
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