Austen 250

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

Austen footsteps, Southampton edition

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

If you missed the Autumn Walking Festival in Alton, England , next door to the Hampshire village where Jane Austen spent the last eight...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 13

I still remember the first time I watched the BBC’s iconic 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . At the time, my husband and I lived...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 30

Nobody has to tell us Janeites that 2025—aka the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth—is a special year to visit Austen sites in the...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 16

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

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 2

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

Are you feeling sad that you won’t be able to join the Jane Austen 250th Birthday festivities in England next year? Fear not! You can...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 18, 2024

Jane Austen breathed her last on July 18, 1817, in rented rooms at 8 College Street in the English cathedral city of Winchester. For...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 14, 2024

In chapter 27 of Emma , sweet but dim Harriet Smith dithers over her shopping, while Emma Woodhouse tries “with all the force of her own...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 4, 2024

Jane Austen’s formal education was brief. Between the ages of seven and ten, she spent a little over two years attending two different...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 28, 2024