LETTERS : Slavery links

THE reviewers Tom Paulin cites as being "enraged" by the linking of Mansfield Park with the slave trade (The Art of Criticism, Sunday Review, 5 February) were clearly as unaware as he that Edward Said, fine writer that he is, was not the first to make this connection. That distinction almost certainly belongs to Vladimir Nabokov, who made this point in Lectures on Literature as early as the 1940s.

Neil Saunders

London SW6