The weirdly modern Jane Austen debate we still haven’t figured out

There’s a bizarrely opaque, oddly modern question hovering over the legacy of Jane Austen. And despite centuries of debate, scholars still haven’t been able to figure out how to answer it.

Jane Austen lived under the rule of a slave-trading empire. What did she think about that? And if we could figure out what someone so smart and morally conscious thought about life in a colonizing power, what would that tell us about how ordinary people make their peace with living with an atrocity?

One scene in particular is key to this debate. It comes in Austen’s third published novel, 1814’s Mansfield Park. Today, Mansfield Park is one of Austen’s least-loved books. Nonetheless, it is her only book to feature characters discussing slavery without using it as a metaphor for something else — and, upo