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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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Father knows best
Although Jane Austen’s novels never commanded huge print runs – the biggest, for Emma, totaled only two thousand copies -- Austen first...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 22, 2022
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Quack
As luck would have it, my family’s Thanksgiving guest list this year will once again consist of none but our four selves. And just as we...
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 24, 2022
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Scary monsters
Happy Halloween, Janeites! Although Austen wrote no scenes of trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving, or gorging on candy corn, she certainly...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 31, 2022
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Lucky thirteen
Thirty-nine years ago, during my first semester of college, I took the train from New Haven to Philadelphia to attend my first Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 29, 2022
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Diving deep
We Janeites like to say that Austen’s novels repay slow and careful perusal, and that every time we reread, we discover something new....
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 29, 2022
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As seen by AI
Jane Austen famously supplies few physical descriptions of her characters – little beyond eye color, hair color, or relative height, and...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 1, 2022
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Cue the wine and cheese
Last spring, as blog readers will recall, the London Times announced that Persuasion was the sixth most popular book on TikTok, the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 25, 2022
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#AustenTok
If you’ve ever wondered whether the shortening of our collective attention span spells doom for the appreciation of Jane Austen's...
Deborah Yaffe
May 26, 2022
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Jane all around
Jane Austen turns up in the most unexpected places, doesn’t she? Here’s where she’s been in the past week: --Jane Austen and true crime:...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 31, 2022
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Getting warmer
When it comes to climate change, is Jane Austen part of the problem? In a grossly oversimplified nutshell, that’s the question that will...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 6, 2022
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Many happy returns
Two hundred and forty-six years ago today, a daughter was born to Cassandra Leigh Austen and her husband, the Reverend George Austen. The...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 16, 2021
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The opposite of speed reading
How long does it take to read a Jane Austen novel? At roughly three hundred pages apiece, her books are far shorter than the works of...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 27, 2021
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