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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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Un-bingeing
Unlike so many novelists of the Victorian period, Jane Austen didn’t publish her books in serial form. The first readers of, say, David...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 26, 2021
Persuasion everywhere
Persuasion is having quite a year. Last December, a charmless modern update called Modern Persuasion – the dull, on-the-nose title gave...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 22, 2021
Three weeks, three books (or is it four?)
Jane Austen sightings are like buses: Sometimes, you don’t get one for ages, and sometimes, they come in bunches. These last few weeks...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 22, 2021
Eternal verities
Despite the strangeness of this year, some eternal verities remain. Snowflakes. Evergreens. Misquoting Jane Austen. A few highlights of...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 17, 2020
Keeping up with the Kambridges
Trendy fashion accessories come and go. One year, it’s thigh-high red boots and black berets; the next it’s purple shoes and tiny...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 1, 2020
Feverish
No one in Jane Austen’s novels becomes infected with a coronavirus, but that doesn’t mean she has nothing to say on the subject that now...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 15, 2020
Meg, Jo, Elinor, Marianne
Like all American girls, I loved Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and when I shared it with my daughter many years after my first...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 9, 2020
Jane Austen's side hustle
These days, it takes a lot for an instance of Austenian inaccuracy to surprise me. I hardly turn a hair when quotes from Austen screen...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 5, 2019
Family dinner
As we sit down to our turkey tonight, perhaps in company with relatives or acquaintances whom we carefully avoid the rest of the year,...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 28, 2019
Strange bedfellows
By now, we’ve gotten used to seeing Jane Austen in rather. . . um . . . interesting company. She’s been paired with zombies and sea...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 4, 2019
Janeite on the Potomac, Part II
Bipartisanship is sadly rare in Washington these days, so it’s refreshing to find one instance of agreement across the aisle, even in...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 25, 2019
Greatest Hits, Part I
The Emmy nominations were announced recently, and all the brouhaha over Game of Thrones et al. has left me hankering to award some...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 28, 2019
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