Sense and Sensibility | DeborahYaffe.com

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

Coming of age

Say this for Jane Austen: She’s an inexhaustible source of roles for actresses who have aged out of the film industry’s ingenue...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 28

Hatching time

Like periodical cicadas, Austen adaptations come around on a predictable schedule. Every ten or fifteen years, a newly hatched crew of...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 24

Picking favorites

When I’m asked which Jane Austen novel is my favorite—and if you write a book about Jane Austen fandom, you will be asked this question...

Deborah Yaffe

Apr 7

Back in the day

I still remember the first time I watched the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . At the time, my husband and I lived...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 30

On this day in 1813. . .

Ninety-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. What tribute does a friend owe to a published author?...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 7, 2024

Celebrating S&S

Over the past decade-plus, as Jane Austen’s novels reached their publication bicentennials, writer and scholar Sarah Emsley invited...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 27, 2024

Growth spurt

Back in the 2010s, when I first started reading Jane Austen fanfic, the typical example of the genre was a romance novel, either Regency...

Deborah Yaffe

May 9, 2024

Playing it safe

Early in the Hallmark Channel’s new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, the recently bereaved Dashwood women stand on the front steps of...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 26, 2024

Noted

When my children were in grade school, their English teachers often required them to annotate their reading: For each chapter, students...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 18, 2024

Austenian situationships

“There is a scene in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility where the hopelessly romantic Marianne Dashwood writes a letter to a man she...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 15, 2024

Jane-talk, sponsored

Back in the summer of 2022, TikTok kicked off its inaugural book club with a group reading of Persuasion. Allegedly, the TikTok Book Club...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 4, 2024

Happy New Loveyear

New Year’s Day has its melancholy side: Tinsel shelved until next December, work on the horizon, hangover hanging on. Luckily, however,...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 1, 2024