Yaffe went on a Jane Austen tour with other enthusiasts, a journey which included stops in the towns in which Austen set her books, one of Austen's homes, and some of the places where famous Austen movies were filmed. At one point, the group traveled to Mompesson House, which served as the Dashwood family's London house in the 1995 film version of "Sense and Sensibility." The property manager who worked on the movie, Karen Rudd, told the group of an incident in which a parrot that appeared in the film escaped, a big problem in an antique house stocked with very expensive historical objects. "It wasn't a laughing matter at the time," Rudd said.
