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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
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Deborah Yaffe
Feb 6
Treasure trove
Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk , often described as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a laptop, is usually on display at the...
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Deborah Yaffe
Dec 23, 2024
Whale watching
Did Herman Melville read Jane Austen? Chronologically, he could have—he was born two years after Austen’s death—but temperamentally, it...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jun 3, 2024
Bolt from the blue
Does Jane Austen owe her fame to an excellent publicist? The legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein says yes—or at least maybe—in a recent LitHub...
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Deborah Yaffe
May 16, 2024
Mad about the Regency
The third season of Bridgerton, Netflix’s smash-hit Regency romance series, launches today. To mark the occasion, a professor at...
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Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2024
Seven paragraphs to read if you want to
I should probably spend less time thinking about stupid clickbait listicles that mention Jane Austen. My mental health would improve. My...
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Deborah Yaffe
Sep 14, 2023
Updating the syllabus
In the bad old days of pre-1980s academia, you could major in English literature and never be assigned a novel by Jane Austen—or so I’ve...
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Deborah Yaffe
Aug 17, 2023
Testing, testing
In spring 2022, the right-wing British press ginned up a storm of outrage over the claim that a Scottish university had dropped Jane...
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Deborah Yaffe
Dec 5, 2022
Treasures of the collection
A year after a priceless nineteenth-century literary collection was rescued from the auction block and donated to public institutions...
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Deborah Yaffe
Oct 27, 2022
Read all about it
Like most writers, Jane Austen was a reader, avidly consuming the poetry, fiction, and non-fiction prose of her day. Her letters offer...
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Deborah Yaffe
Sep 15, 2022
Broadening the collection
The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jun 13, 2022
Recommended reading
To Janeites – indeed, to anyone who’s read semi-widely and who isn’t V.S. Naipaul – it’s obvious that women are capable of writing great...
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Deborah Yaffe
Apr 28, 2022
Under the floorboards
When I was a little girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse. I liked setting up tiny roomscapes filled with detailed, perfectly manageable...
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