A Utah teacher used an online thesaurus as part of her lessons on Pride and Prejudice.

Sharlene Beck teaches English and creative writing at Hillcrest High, and recently used the visual thesaurus to teach a Jane Austen classic.

Sharlene Beck: “I used the thesauras to show them, first of all, a variety of meanings for ‘prejudice,’ a variety of meanings for ‘pride,’ and that some of them could be positive and some of them negative, that both words had mulitiple connotations.”

Very true!

The Guardian quotes Jane Austen in an article on cricket:

England will defend Jones’s propriety to the limit. This is propriety not quite as advanced by Jane Austen. “I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety,” she wrote in Sense and Sensibility. In the case of England cricket, she is about to be proved spot on.

Ah, but one of Jane’s heroines at least did not object to boy’s games:

She was fond of all boy’s plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. . . .Mrs. Morland was a very good woman, and wished to see her children everything they ought to be; but her time was so much occupied in lying-in and teaching the little ones, that her elder daughters were inevitably left to shift for themselves; and it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books — or at least books of information — for, provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

The Telegraph gave Matthew MacFadyen an opportunity to plug his latest projects in an article about the actor. Of interest to Janeites is his description of his take on Darcy:

Likewise, he says, he feels for Darcy, not playing him as an arrogant stiff who softens with love, but as a complicated young man struggling with huge responsibilities (his parents have died; he has inherited, at 28, [sic] a house and estate and responsibility for an entire community of workers), whose awkwardness occasionally becomes crass. ‘It’s a wonderful part,’ he says.

‘I didn’t see Colin Firth’s Darcy or Olivier’s, so I didn’t think of it as an iconic part. I just really felt for Darcy himself. He’s got that adolescent quality of when you think really deeply but sometimes behave callously.’ He shrugs again. ‘I’m sure the knives will be out for me playing him. I bet loads of actors passed on it for that reason.’

Joe Wright, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE’S director, commented on Macfadyen’s appraisal of Darcy-Fear amongst leading men. Shockingly, the director maintains that MacFadyen was the only actor seriously considered for the part. (This must be the first time a director has ever made such a statement to the press.)

Wright laughs. ‘Matthew was the first person I thought of when I read the script,’ he says. ‘I think he’s the best actor of his generation. We had to do a worldwide search, because we couldn’t leave any stone unturned in case there was a better Darcy. But there wasn’t. There aren’t many young male actors who have clout and sex appeal and yet aren’t afraid of not being liked.

“He’s unlikable at first, Darcy, and most actors are terrified of not being liked - not Matthew. And yet he has an openness that allows you to fall in love with him.’

This Cub Reporter, for one, is very much looking forward to what MacFadyen brings to the screen as Darcy.