James Austen | 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

On this day in 1798. . .

Ninety-seventh in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Mary Lloyd was a friend of Jane and Cassandra Austen...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 2, 2024

The celebration of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth won’t officially kick off until next year, but that isn’t stopping the...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 17, 2024

Ninety-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Janeites do not always take Jane Austen at her word when it...

Deborah Yaffe

Oct 7, 2024

Eighty-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In January 1801, the twenty-five-year-old Jane Austen was...

Deborah Yaffe

Jan 9, 2023

Seventy-fifth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. How autobiographical is Jane Austen’s writing? Impossible...

Deborah Yaffe

May 12, 2022

Sixty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen communicated nothing particularly remarkable in...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 11, 2021

Fifty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. When Jane Austen sat down to write a letter to her sister,...

Deborah Yaffe

Dec 28, 2020

Forty-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s brothers were a reproductively prolific lot, at...

Deborah Yaffe

Jul 15, 2019

Twentieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen came from a large and close-knit tribe of siblings...

Deborah Yaffe

Feb 9, 2017