Midway through Jane Austen's 1814 novel Mansfield Park, a few lines of prose rouse readers into a debate that still rages. The heroine, Fanny Price, known for both her timidity and strong moral backbone, broaches a controversial topic among relatives: the presence of slaves on her uncle's sugar plantations in Antigua, then a British colony. Fanny's inquiry goes unanswered—or as she describes it, a "dead silence!" cuts through the air, as her cousins sit idly by "without speaking a word or seeming at all interested in the subject."

Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,