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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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Getting it wrong
Jane Austen, it seems safe to say, is one of the most famous writers who ever lived, especially in English-speaking countries. Yet out...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 7, 2019
Bewitched
Among Janeites, the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice is . . . controversial. Purists, especially those old enough to have seen an...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 25, 2019
What's your name again?
It’s always enjoyable when the mass media provide opportunities for us Janeites to snark about everyone else’s Austen ignorance. Today’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 18, 2019
Printer error
Few expressions of Janeite commitment are as permanent -- not to mention as painful -- as the Jane Austen tattoo. Therefore, I’d have...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 21, 2019
Desperately seeking romance in Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Jane Austen that “of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.” Let...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 13, 2018
On this day in 1812. . .
Thirty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Talk about burying the lead. The letter that Jane Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 29, 2018
Missing pieces
From time to time, you happen across a story that makes clear how entirely some people miss the point of Jane Austen. For instance, when...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 15, 2018
Janeite Christmas at Hallmark
They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. So perhaps the...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 29, 2018
Mockingbird in a landslide
Can I get half credit? As blog readers will recall, last week I predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that Pride and Prejudice,...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 25, 2018
The envelope, please. . .
When midnight strikes on the west coast tonight, something momentous will take place: Voting will close in PBS’s Great American Read...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 18, 2018
Unfinished business
Jane Austen’s books – usually Pride and Prejudice, sometimes Emma, occasionally one of the others -- perennially land on those...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 8, 2018
Mismatch
Jane Austen’s novels are filled with marital mismatches. Clever, sardonic Mr. Bennet treats Mrs. Bennet with thinly veiled disrespect. In...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 1, 2018
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