top of page
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
Search
Jane Austen fundraising
Jane Austen’s views on the international tragedies of her time are mostly unknown, except when they are brutally unsentimental. “How...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9
Essex Emma
Novelists haven’t been shy about updating Emma to various walks of contemporary life: We’ve had queer teen Emma , hetero teen Emma ,...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 29
Clueless again?
The 1995 film Clueless is many things—a beloved teen comedy, the locus classicus for indispensable expressions like “As if!” and one of...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 7
Immersion
While Hampshire, England, is Ground Zero for Austen 250 celebrations, we Americans are doing our best to participate—and this week, the...
Deborah Yaffe
May 8
Pemberley-at-sea
Although Jane Austen never set sail, her ties to seafaring, forged through the experiences of her two sailor brothers, were close and...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 8, 2024
Lady Susan on tour
With their witty dialogue and streamlined storytelling, Jane Austen’s novels have many of the qualities of the best plays. No wonder they...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 28, 2024
Taking liberties
In 2021, London theatergoers got a Pride and Prejudice with interpolated pop songs and an all-female cast. In 2022, they got a...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 15, 2024
P&P down on the farm
Earlier this year, the off-Broadway 59E59 Theaters hosted a one-man show about the afterlife of Pride and Prejudice’s villainous Mr....
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 6, 2023
Text and subtext
These days, some thirty years after the literary critic Edward Said first offered a post-colonial reading of Mansfield Park, the idea...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 22, 2023
High-camp Jane Austen
After a year that brought not one but two same-sex updates of Pride and Prejudice, we probably don’t need further proof that the queering...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 15, 2022
Killing Mr. Darcy
You’ve heard it before: Modern men can’t measure up to Jane Austen’s heroes. Straight, female Janeites are hooked on impossible...
Deborah Yaffe
May 2, 2022
Persuasion, with soap
As Valentine’s Day dawns, all across the Netflix-speaking Janeite world, we are waiting impatiently for the new film adaptation of Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 14, 2022
bottom of page