December - 2024

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

Deborah Yaffe

1 day ago

Whale watching

Did Herman Melville read Jane Austen? Chronologically, he could have—he was born two years after Austen’s death—but temperamentally, it...

Deborah Yaffe

5 days ago

The oracle of Austen

Long ago, as readers of Among the Janeites may recall, I had a curious encounter with a Jane Austen tarot card. It appeared to advise me...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 16

Celebrating significance

At my synagogue, members sometimes engage in public religious rituals to mark what we discreetly call “significant birthdays”--in other...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 12

Rank order

Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, England—her home for the last eight years of her life, and the place where she wrote or revised all six...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 9

Jane Austen's fingerprints

In these days of standardized computer fonts and software-assisted editing, one writer’s manuscript probably looks much like another’s....

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 5

Janeite grandmother

In this season of brutal political combat, it’s consoling to remember back to a less conflict-ridden past. And so it is that I felt a...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 2

On this day in 1798. . .

Ninety-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Mary Lloyd was a friend of Jane and Cassandra Austen...