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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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Riding high
By now, Jane Austen has made so many top-novel lists that it’s hard to come up with anything new to say when she makes yet another one....
Deborah Yaffe
Nov 11, 2019
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Liar, liar
In David Lodge’s classic 1975 academic novel Changing Places, the English-professor characters discuss a game of intellectual chicken...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 10, 2019
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On this day in 1814. . .
Forty-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s letters, with their unpolished emphasis on...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 9, 2019
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Austen's pewter
Jane Austen, her brother Henry would have us believe, didn’t care about making money. “She became an authoress entirely from taste and...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 12, 2019
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Greatest Hits, Part II
As I have pointed out rather often, most recently earlier this week, the Internet is filled with quotes from filmed adaptations of Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Aug 1, 2019
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Busting Austen myths
Most Janeites don’t need to hear, yet again, that Jane Austen was not a kindly maiden aunt whose sweet, insubstantial little romance...
Deborah Yaffe
May 13, 2019
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On this day in 1805. . .
Forty-third in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. "It is a period, indeed!” Captain Wentworth exclaims to Anne...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 11, 2019
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CliffsNotes for kiddies
I am all in favor of introducing young people to great literature, even great literature they are probably too young to fully appreciate....
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 1, 2019
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Getting it wrong
Jane Austen, it seems safe to say, is one of the most famous writers who ever lived, especially in English-speaking countries. Yet out...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 7, 2019
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The dating game
Valentine’s Day, the celebration of lovers, dates back to the Middle Ages. Yet Jane Austen – often described as the mother of the romance...
Deborah Yaffe
Feb 14, 2019
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Nineteen
Nineteen is a number much on our collective minds today, as we prepare to usher in 2019, the last year of the second decade of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 31, 2018
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'Twas the night before Christmas
Tomorrow is Christmas, the day on which a larger-than-life personage employing semi-equine transport suddenly appears in our homes,...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 24, 2018
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