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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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Delayed snark
Some five years ago, my local chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America sponsored a discussion of Jane Austen at Home , the...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 17
3
Janeite grandmother
In this season of brutal political combat, it’s consoling to remember back to a less conflict-ridden past. And so it is that I felt a...
Deborah Yaffe
Dec 5, 2024
0
Love among the stacks
Is Jane Austen a romance novelist? Discuss. Or, if you’re not interested in revisiting your test-taking days, you could just travel to...
Deborah Yaffe
Sep 19, 2024
4
Acquired taste
Mansfield Park’s status as the most polarizing of Jane Austen’s novels is by now well-established. It’s the black-olives-and-anchovy...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 6, 2024
0
Growth spurt
Back in the 2010s, when I first started reading Jane Austen fanfic, the typical example of the genre was a romance novel, either Regency...
Deborah Yaffe
May 9, 2024
1
On this day in 1814. . .
Ninety-second in an occasional series of excerpts from Jane Austen's letters. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Mar 21, 2024
0
Headline magic
If you read the UK media, you might be forgiven for thinking that no story about British real estate is complete without a link to Jane...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 8, 2024
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Interview of a lifetime?
I knew it! Jane Austen loves me! “Kindred spirits, indeed!” the author, dead since 1817, told me last week. “Our friendship would have...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
0
Jane Austen speaks . . . sort of
On October 3, I conducted a Facebook Messenger chat with Jane Austen, or at least with the AI named after her--one of twenty-eight AI...
Deborah Yaffe
Oct 9, 2023
4
Text and subtext
These days, some thirty years after the literary critic Edward Said first offered a post-colonial reading of Mansfield Park, the idea...
Deborah Yaffe
Jun 22, 2023
0
Alumni reunions
Over the holidays, my family settled in for a screening of that sublime romcom Notting Hill. When the movie ended (“I’m just a girl,...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 12, 2023
6
A Janeite's Janeite passes on
Edith Lank, who died on New Year’s Day at the age of ninety-six, was a Janeite’s Janeite. She read and reread Austen’s novels; began...
Deborah Yaffe
Jan 5, 2023
2
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