Mansfield Park | DeborahYaffe.com 2/5

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

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

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

Jan 5, 2023

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

Nov 17, 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

Oct 31, 2022

Snooze

People who hate Jane Austen – yes, such benighted folks do exist – sometimes claim that she is so-o-o boring that she causes eyelids to...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 17, 2022

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

Jun 14, 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 13, 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

May 6, 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 15, 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

Apr 1, 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...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 11, 2021