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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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Bookshelf for sale
At the back of Rebecca Romney’s new book Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 27
2
Clearing the backlog
It’s been a grand total of four weeks since I last reported on Jane Austen-related misinformation/foolishness on the internet. And...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 24
0
Treasure trove
Jane Austen’s travelling writing desk , often described as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a laptop, is usually on display at the...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 6
0
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
Dec 23, 2024
0
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...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 3, 2024
3
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...
Deborah Yaffe
May 16, 2024
0
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...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2024
0
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...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 14, 2023
0
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...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 17, 2023
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Treasures of the collection
A year after a priceless nineteenth-century literary collection was rescued from the auction block and donated to public institutions...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 5, 2022
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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...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 27, 2022
0
Broadening the collection
The last time the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft was the subject of a public fundraising effort, the results were...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 15, 2022
0
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