Austenland | DeborahYaffe.com

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

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

Apparently, I am not the only person who never tires of romcoms in which a Jane Austen fan’s romantic life starts to mirror Austen’s...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 5, 2024

By now, we’ve had so many movies in which a youngish, female Jane Austen fan discovers that her modern-day romantic life is somehow mixed...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 29, 2024

My husband likes to read. But the books he picks! All those violent Nordic thrillers! All those biographies of rock musicians! All those...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 11, 2023

Music plays intermittent cameo roles in Jane Austen’s novels: think of Mary Bennet delighting us long enough in Pride and Prejudice, or...

Deborah Yaffe

Nov 7, 2019

For someone who’s been dead since 1817, Jane Austen had a pretty good year in 2013. She was honored with a set of UK stamps, and her...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 30, 2013

Shannon Hale’s Austenland is not a great work of literature: it’s a mildly entertaining beach read with a cute romantic denouement. The...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 9, 2013

Austenland, the new movie based on Shannon Hale's novel about a Colin Firth-obsessed woman vacationing at a Regency theme park, won't...

Deborah Yaffe

Sep 5, 2013

The Dallas Morning News' film critic, Chris Vognar, talked with me for a column he's just published on Austen fervor and the new movie of...

Deborah Yaffe

Aug 29, 2013

The release date for Among the Janeites has been moved up about a month, to August 6 – we’re hoping to catch a bit of the publicity wave...

Deborah Yaffe

May 2, 2013