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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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Home stretch
It’s here at last: The final month of this Austen 250 year—which just happens to be the very month in which we will commemorate Jane Austen’s 250 th birthday. As we march inexorably towards the great day of December 16, the pace of celebratory events is hardly slackening—quite the contrary, in fact. Case in point: Over the next two weeks, at least eleven libraries (public, academic, or research-focused) in England and the US have Austen 250 events planned—tea parties, movi
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 1


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
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