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...
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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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Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 12
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 5
A Janeite's Janeite passes on
Edith Lank, who died on New Year’s Day at the age of ninety-six, was a Janeite’s Janeite. She read and reread Austen’s novels; began...
Deborah Yaffe
- Nov 17, 2022
Not so timeless
As regular blog readers know, among my favorite pastimes is mocking the internet for its habit of attributing quotations from screen...
Deborah Yaffe
- Oct 31, 2022
Scary monsters
Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 14, 2021
On this day in 1814. . .
Sixty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. No author – not even Jane Austen -- is immune to the charm...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 13, 2021
Data storage, the Jane Austen way
Anyone whose college papers reside on now-unreadable floppy disks has probably wondered whether the human race is on the brink of an...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 6, 2021
Interrogating an interrogation
Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 15, 2021
Cross-channel connections
Jane Austen is usually thought of as a quintessentially English writer, what with all those landed estates, rural rectories, and mannerly...
Deborah Yaffe
- Apr 1, 2021
On this day in 1816. . .
Sixty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. From time to time, you will hear writers claim that they...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 11, 2021
Old issues, new questions
Five years ago, I wrote a magazine article about the controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s repugnant racial views – an aspect of the...
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