The 89-year-old screenwriter is right to say that such darkness can be found in Austen’s novels – they are not all “light & bright & sparkling” as she wrote of Pride and Prejudice. The perception that external events like the Napoleonic wars are ignored is equally untrue. From Edward Said’s 1993 essay Jane Austen and Empire to a recent piece by the novelist Lauren Groff, critics have debated the role of slavery in Mansfield Park.