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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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Girls on film
Three-quarters of the twenty-first century lies ahead of us, but already the New York Times is hard at work on clickbait Best of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 4
Clueless again?
The 1995 film Clueless is many things—a beloved teen comedy, the locus classicus for indispensable expressions like “As if!” and one of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7
Mr. Darcy wins again
Last year, when I first heard about the new French romcom Jane Austen Wrecked My Life , I predicted that its romantic triangle, pitting...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 13
Celebration, by any name
A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2
Sounds familiar
By now, we’ve had so many movies in which a youngish, female Jane Austen fan discovers that her modern-day romantic life is somehow mixed...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 29, 2024
Snooze
Earlier this year, I had the occasion (read: an excuse) to rewatch several of the feature-film adaptations of Emma. I reconfirmed the...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 22, 2024
Hey, cupcake
Last month, noting the pending release of a Pride and Prejudice screen update entitled Townhouse Confidential, I reported, “My...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 6, 2023
Boy meets pig
By now, we know that the Pride and Prejudice formula—opposites attract, enemies to lovers, snobby-meets-snarky—accommodates many...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 12, 2022
A milestone farewell
MGM’s 1940 movie of Pride and Prejudice was the first screen adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, and with its Victorian fashions,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 22, 2022
A surfeit of sequels
Jane Austen never wrote a sequel. Among her many excellent qualities was a sure sense of when to leave well enough alone. Alas, too many...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 4, 2022
Something to talk about
Google the Omniscient doesn’t seem to know if it was Henry Ford, P.T. Barnum, or somebody else entirely who first declared, “I don’t care...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 21, 2022
In praise of repression
Early on in Netflix’s polarizing new adaptation of Persuasion, Anne Elliot leafs through a scrapbook in which she has preserved accounts...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 18, 2022
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