All this to say, continuing to read Austen’s work does not require the zero-sum feat of intellectual gymnastics that the art-for-art’s-sake gang seems to fear: acknowledging the truth of colonialism and the slave trade in Austen’s era is no vandalizing act of literary deletion, but an act of literary expansion and restoration, not to mention the barest concession to reality (if anything, it’s quite a politically radical reading to argue that race did not exist as a subject of contemplation in Austen’s world; as bizarre as arguing that it does not exist as a subject of contemplation in ours).
