In Mansfield Park, Austen explores the complexities of the Bertram family, morality, relationship intrigues, wealth, poverty, imperialism and slavery in the British Empire – and it’s probably true to say that the issues are as relevant today as they were then.

Russell’s novel Maria Returns: Barbados to Mansfield Park brings together her two great loves – the novels of Jane Austen and, in particular, Mansfield Park, and her love of Barbados. In Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram Rushworth , brings shame to her family when she leaves her husband Mr Rushworth for Henry Crawford who eventually gets bored with their affair and leaves her. Disgraced and alone, Maria is sent by her family to live in exile with the bullying aunt, Mrs Norris, to a remote part of the country.

Russell says she liked Maria and wondered what would have happened to her. “I began to think about how she would have survived. She would have been angry and resentful but eventually she would have had to come to some kind of acceptance of her situation.”

So Russell sets out to explore in her book a possible scenario taking the opportunity to transform the shamed Maria from disgrace into one who challenges her family’s wealth and their attitude to slavery culminating in her redemption.

“I’ve always felt sorry for Maria,” Russell says. “I thought, let’s send her somewhere where she can encounter a very different perspective on the source of the wealth that created her family home at Mansfield Park – sugar plantations, slavery and so on, and let’s confront some of the implications for herself and her family.”

Russell has Maria travelling to the Caribbean island of Barbados with friends she met while in exile. There she discovers a secret that implicates family members in ways that expose the practice of slavery and the hypocrisy and the double standards of a privileged life at Mansfield Park. Russell reminds us of the “kind of things” that went on in plantations and that were swept under the table.

“My book talks about the possibility of one of the Bertrams having fathered a child with a slave woman, which was common, and the resulting child, of course, is the person that Maria meets up with in Barbados,” she says. “Maria forms an attachment to her [the child] and brings her back to England to confront the family with what they had done. When Sir Thomas Bertram discovers that his son’s slave mistress is in a relationship with somebody, he quickly bundles her off to Barbados to maintain the respect of the family.

“The story goes in my book that the slave owner’s son has a conscience and has liberated his slaves and has a different set-up to his father. There is historical precedence for various people, particularly in Barbados, to take a more liberal attitude towards their slaves, perhaps to educate them and treat them better and so a lot of the characters in the book are based on historical antecedence.”

Russell has lived in Canberra since 1982. Awarded a PhD in English in 2011 from the University of New South Wales, she is director of Roslyn Russell Museum Services and has an interest in preserving the world’s documentary heritage through her involvement with UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program. Her work on many heritage projects and exhibitions includes the National Museum of Australia and Canberra Museum and Gallery.

As an historian, she says experience of writing the novel was fascinating. “Every historian has a novel in their back pocket,” she says. “A lot of us want to see if we can make a story that is credible and reads as fiction rather than fact. Liberating yourself from the referencing [of academic writing] is an interesting process. You’re always thinking, ‘I’ve got to come back to reality, to the touchstone of documentary evidence’ and so on, and I must say that I did quite a bit of research to get my historical background right.

“Another major impulse to write the book was that since 2006 I’ve spent a lot of time in Barbados writing history and working on exhibitions. My book falls squarely within the sequel genre. One of the problems with writing sequels to famous works like Jane Austen is that very often people go scampering off in all sorts of weird directions.

“Often they’re not true to the spirit of Jane Austen’s works but they’re deeply ahistorical and the language is wrong - the way people behave and think is wrong. You really need to ground this kind of fiction in history and so I was very careful to make sure that the language I used didn’t violate the canon, in a sense.”

Russell first encountered Jane Austen while studying English at the University of Sydney in the 1960s. “The first book we did was Emma and then Mansfield Park,” she says. “From then on I became a devotee of Jane Austen and indeed of the Brontes, Dickens and the 19th-century novelists and Trollope later in the era.”

The book had been gestating for quite a while before Russell started writing it about three years ago. “At the time I was writing it, I was doing a lot of long distance air travel and would close my eyes and let my mind revolve around the next chapter. When I arrived to wherever, I’d write the next chapter.”

Although only a slim volume at 158 pages, Russell says she had to complete the book between other projects. “Some of my friends said, ‘You should have made it longer – she should have gone back to Barbados’. [But] the story is what it is and I wanted it to end where it ended. I felt that it was complete as a story and I’d done what I set out to do.”

Maria Returns: Barbados to Mansfield Park, by Roslyn Russell, is published by BG Publishers.