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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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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
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