Housekeeping
Jane Austen apparently liked to eat – “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me,” she wrote to her sister in June...
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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
Jun 24, 2021
Sanditon, the convention
In the past three years, Sanditon, the TV series based on Jane Austen’s last unfinished novel, has roller-coastered through a dizzying...
Deborah Yaffe
May 6, 2021
Interrogating an interrogation
Among my many Janeite pet peeves is the caricaturing of Austen fans as prudish ultraconservatives who stick their fingers in their ears...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 31, 2020
Goodbye at last, 2020
A year ago, I confidently predicted a 2020 filled with the usual array of Austen events: “Teas, balls, fairs, festivals, conferences,...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 3, 2020
In lieu of a pear tree
It’s a tough year for traditional Christmas celebrations. The eight maids are a-milking in masks. The ten lords are a-leaping six feet...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 25, 2020
Chawton cottage panorama
Pandemic life has made clear, at least to me, that online interactions are no substitute for the in-real-life kind. Still, it’s...
Deborah Yaffe
Jul 8, 2020
Happy birthday, JAS
A thousand years ago – or, actually, back in January – the big Janeite news of 2020 was shaping up to be the eightieth anniversary of the...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 14, 2020
Chawton cottage on the brink?
Chawton cottage, the house in Hampshire, England, where Jane Austen lived for the last eight years of her life, is the Austen pilgrimage...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 26, 2020
Janeite SOS
It’s no secret that the closing of pretty much everything in response to the coronavirus pandemic has hit non-profits and arts...
Deborah Yaffe
Apr 19, 2020
From museum to house
Two years ago, Chawton House Library – a research center for the study of early English writing by women, located in an Elizabethan...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 2, 2020
Eighty years on
The year that began yesterday will not bring us any important Jane Austen anniversaries: The bicentenaries of her death and of the...
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