Southampton | 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

Gifts

My husband was sure there would be no gift shop at 8 College Street , the Winchester house where Jane Austen died, and which opened to...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 21, 2025

The city of Southampton makes no one’s list of England's top Jane Austen sites. Although she briefly attended school there as a child and...

Deborah Yaffe

Mar 20, 2025

A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 2, 2025

Jane Austen is the ultimate crossover artist, with an unchallenged position in both literary studies and popular culture. (Hey, didn’t...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 21, 2024

The celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth won’t officially kick off until next year, but that isn’t stopping the...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 17, 2024

The moral seems clear: Bonnets are no match for the brutal imperatives of capitalism. It’s been five months since the owners of a...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 15, 2024

In December 1793, during a visit to cousins in the Hampshire city of Southampton, the soon-to-turn-eighteen-year-old Jane Austen danced...

Deborah Yaffe

Jun 20, 2024

If you read the UK media, you might be forgiven for thinking that no story about British real estate is complete without a link to Jane...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 8, 2024

Jane Austen’s stays in the southern English port of Southampton were short-ish and not especially happy. As a seven-year-old, she...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 20, 2023

At this point in Jane Austen’s career of pop-culture celebrity, it’s no surprise that every place with even a tangential connection to...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 3, 2018