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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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Deborah Yaffe
Dec 2, 2024
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...
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Deborah Yaffe
Oct 10, 2024
Plain and ornamental
In his 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen , the author’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, reports that his famous aunt “was successful in...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jun 3, 2024
Bolt from the blue
Does Jane Austen owe her fame to an excellent publicist? The legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein says yes—or at least maybe—in a recent LitHub...
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Deborah Yaffe
Nov 7, 2022
Slush
Today, it’s called the slush pile: the tottering heap of unsolicited manuscripts that clog the mailboxes—these days, the email boxes—of...
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Deborah Yaffe
Nov 25, 2021
On this day in 1798. . .
Sixty-ninth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters. Jane Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, who wrote the...
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Deborah Yaffe
Oct 7, 2020
Window shopping
Even before the coronavirus curtailed recreational travel, the Internet-assisted ogling of Jane Austen-adjacent real estate was one of...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jan 23, 2020
On this day in 1817. . .
Fifty-first in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s an occupational hazard of the writing life that once...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jul 14, 2019
On this day in 1816. . .
Forty-sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Jane Austen’s brothers were a reproductively prolific lot, at...
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Deborah Yaffe
May 26, 2019
On this day in 1817. . .
Forty-fourth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. In May of 1817, the gravely ill Jane Austen left her home...
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Deborah Yaffe
Dec 17, 2018
On this day in 1816. . .
Fortieth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. It’s not always easy to tell when Jane Austen, master of irony,...
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Deborah Yaffe
Jul 8, 2015
On this day in 1816. . .
Sixth in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen’s letters By all accounts, Jane Austen was an exceptional aunt, and she had a...
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Deborah Yaffe
Apr 2, 2014
How to write like Austen
Jane Austen’s writing routine: a model for us all? Apparently so, according to a new-ish book mentioned in a recent Harvard Business...
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