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, upon a close reading, the whole book is riddled with references to the slave trade and the slave economy.

The scene in question features the novel’s heroine, poor and downtrodden Fanny Price, talking with her cousin and love interest Edmund Bertram about his father, stern Sir Thomas Bertram.

Fanny is a little afraid of Sir Thomas, who took her into his lavish country home when she was 10 years old as an act of charity. Fanny is now in her late teens, and both Sir Thomas and Edmund know her to be the most upright and moral member of their household — but Sir Thomas is so forbidding, and Fanny so convinced of her social inferiority to her wealthy relations, that she rarely speaks to him of her own volition.

The scene begins with Edmund telling Fanny she should talk to Sir Thomas more. Then Fanny, out of apparently nowhere, starts talking about slavery: “[…]Did not you hear me ask him about the slave-trade last night?”

“I did — and was in hopes the question would be followed up by others. It would have pleased your uncle to be inquired of farther.”

“And I longed to do it — but there was such a dead silence! And while my cousins were sitting by without speaking a word, or seeming at all interested in the subject, I did not like — I thought it would appear as if I wanted to set myself off at their expense, by shewing a curiosity and pleasure in his information which he must wish his own daughters to feel.”

What, literary critics have demanded, is that scene doing in Mansfield Park? Does it have anything to do with why Mansfield Park is such a strange, sad, moralizing novel? What do we make of that “dead silence” that answered Fanny’s question? Is this how normal people talked about slavery at the time? Is it how Austen talked about slavery? What did she think of it? What did other people think of it? Most urgently of all: What horrible things are we treating as polite dinner table conversation without realizing it?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Austen and Mansfield Park over the last few weeks, as President Donald Trump announced his intention to excise from the Smithsonian museums all references to slavery that he finds objectionable, and as conservatives promote educational materials that minimize the effects of slavery on America’s history.

Some scholars argue that Mansfield Park is Austen’s apologia for slavery. The first time I came across that reading, in college, I was depressed by it, in the same way that I was depressed when I learned about the Founding Fathers being slave owners.

Austen has such a clear, precise moral vision: You can hear it ticking through her fiction like clockwork. How awful, I thought, if someone who thought so carefully about what was ethical and what was pleasurable was able to talk herself into internalizing the logic of empire to the point that it warped the very machinery of her novels. What a disappointment. I had the instinct to try to forget Mansfield Park even existed, to bury it away, like the Trump administration demanding the Smithsonian stop talking about slavery so much. It had never been my favorite of Austen’s books, anyway.

But literary scholars aren’t looking for references to slavery in Mansfield Park to try to prove that it is a sinful book that must be forgotten. They are looking for those references to try to figure out how the citizens of the British Empire thought about the terrible acts that were committed in their name, the acts that brought them so much wealth and power. Looking at those thought processes with clear eyes helps us understand how the human mind is capable of deceiving itself — and what we might be deceiving ourselves about too, here at the other end of history.

“Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park.”

To modern readers, Mansfield Park is a strange book in Austen’s beloved oeuvre. Among its more fashionable sisters — sparkling Pride and Prejudice, melancholy Persuasion, clever Emma, bitchy Northanger Abbey, and sweet Sense and Sensibility — Mansfield Park is the Mary Bennet of the........

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