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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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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
2
Dancing through the library
Universities across the country are confronting declining enrollments in humanities fields such as history, literature, and philosophy....
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 6
0
Matters of faith
What were the precise contours of Jane Austen’s religious faith? It’s an open question, given the slenderness of the evidence: some stray...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 27
0
Tunes
“To be quite honest, I do not think I can live without something of a musical society,” the newlywed Mrs. Elton reports telling her...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 17
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
Castle games
At first blush, The Austen Experience seems the stuff of Janeite dreams: A spring weekend spent swanning around a Swedish castle in...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 6
0
Celebration, by any name
A 250th birthday goes by many names . It can be called a semiquincentennial, a sestercentennial, a quarter millennial--even a...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2
2
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 16, 2024
0
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 9, 2024
2
Crossover artist
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
0
Regency stylings
A few months ago, I noted with surprise that I was eagerly anticipating my next visit to a place I often describe as the most boring...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 11, 2024
4
Center of celebration
If next year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth has an epicenter, it would surely be Jane Austen’s House , the...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 24, 2024
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