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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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Picking favorites
When I’m asked which Jane Austen novel is my favorite—and if you write a book about Jane Austen fandom, you will be asked this question...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 7
Delayed snark
Some five years ago, my local chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America sponsored a discussion of Jane Austen at Home , the...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 17
Janeite grandmother
In this season of brutal political combat, it’s consoling to remember back to a less conflict-ridden past. And so it is that I felt a...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 5, 2024
Love among the stacks
Is Jane Austen a romance novelist? Discuss. Or, if you’re not interested in revisiting your test-taking days, you could just travel to...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 19, 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
Growth spurt
Back in the 2010s, when I first started reading Jane Austen fanfic, the typical example of the genre was a romance novel, either Regency...
Deborah Yaffe
May 9, 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
Interview of a lifetime?
I knew it! Jane Austen loves me! “Kindred spirits, indeed!” the author, dead since 1817, told me last week. “Our friendship would have...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
Jane Austen speaks . . . sort of
On October 3, I conducted a Facebook Messenger chat with Jane Austen, or at least with the AI named after her--one of twenty-eight AI...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
Text and subtext
These days, some thirty years after the literary critic Edward Said first offered a post-colonial reading of Mansfield Park, the idea...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 22, 2023
Alumni reunions
Over the holidays, my family settled in for a screening of that sublime romcom Notting Hill. When the movie ended (“I’m just a girl,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 12, 2023
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