Goodbye at last, 2020
A year ago, I confidently predicted a 2020 filled with the usual array of Austen events: “Teas, balls, fairs, festivals, conferences,...
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Deborah Yaffe
- Jul 5, 2020
The Watsons, reborn
Among the Janeite casualties of pandemic lockdown was the planned West End production of The Watsons, Laura Wade’s much-praised...
Deborah Yaffe
- May 6, 2020
On and off
For those of us who love our Jane Austen adaptations, the coronavirus quarantine has been the best of times and the worst of times. The...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jan 2, 2020
Eighty years on
The year that began yesterday will not bring us any important Jane Austen anniversaries: The bicentenaries of her death and of the...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 26, 2019
Fragments of news, news about fragments
The Janeite word of the moment, it would appear, is “fragment.” * Last week, Jane Austen’s House Museum launched an urgent appeal for...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 14, 2018
The Watsons on stage
The Watsons -- the novel Jane Austen began, probably in 1804, but never finished -- is a fascinating fragment. It’s bleak and wintry,...
Deborah Yaffe
- Jun 8, 2014
The complete Hubback, at last
Great news for aficionados of Jane Austen fan fiction: the long-inaccessible third volume of The Younger Sister, by Austen’s niece...
Deborah Yaffe
- Mar 3, 2014
Postscript to "The Watsons in Winter": Bless the Midwest!
The library gods are smiling upon us Janeites. As I reported in my recently completed Watsons in Winter blog series, Jane Austen’s...
Deborah Yaffe
- Feb 13, 2014
Wrapping up The Watsons in Winter
“Each of us has a private Austen,” Karen Joy Fowler writes at the beginning of The Jane Austen Book Club, her 2004 novel about how...
Deborah Yaffe
- Feb 10, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Jennifer Ready Bettiol
Some Jane Austen fanfiction is produced by professional writers with one eye on a potentially profitable market. But much Austen...
Deborah Yaffe
- Feb 6, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Eucharista Ward
Jane Austen’s life was steeped in religion. As the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, she almost certainly believed in God, attended...
Deborah Yaffe
- Feb 3, 2014
The Watsons in Winter: Helen Baker
News flash: it’s hard to write like Jane Austen. I don’t just mean that it’s hard to emulate Austen’s diamond-bright sentences, with...