It doesn't get any more literary than this…

January 24, 2008

Jane Austen and baseball? Who knew?

Thanks to Jim Charlton, publications director of the Society for American Baseball Research for the lead.

According to the OED, the earliest reference to baseball is the Jane Austin novel, which was published in 1815, not 1818 says the OED. I talked to an OED editor a couple of years ago (he had joined SABR to use Proquest, not because he was interested in baseball) and he said that the any update of the OED would reflect research done by Block that mentioned even earlier references to the game. As anyone who owns an OED knows, a new edition is likely a decade away.

In list-serve message from SABR member Roberta Newman:

Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen’s parody of Gothic romances, Northanger Abbey, prefers baseball and other sports to attempting to learn arts necessary to assure the acquisition of a husband.

The baseball part comes in about 1:20 into the video.

“….it was not very wonderful that Catherine should prefer cricket,
base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country, at the
age of fourteen, to books.”

Remember this the next time you guys put down Jane Austen’s work as “chick-lit”…

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