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

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

Frances O’Connor and Jonny Lee Miller in Patricia Rozema’s 1999 adaptation of Mansfield Park. | MGM+ 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 consci…