Not quite cricket
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.
