The Brother HL 2140 is a good printer but getting it to work on Linux Mint is a bit of a hassle. There are many forums online with the problem of the Brother printing many blank pages. Finally, I found one with the solution.
First, be familiar with the CUPS page on your machine: localhost:631/jobs/. Here, you can see/add/remove your printers and your print jobs. The CUPS drivers were installed by default for me on Linux Mint 18.
On this website, you can add a printer, for which it should detect your Brother printer on USB. When selecting the driver though, you need to select “Brother HL-2140 Foomatic/hpijs-pcl5e“. For me, it was no longer recommended, but it was the only driver that did not print only blank pages. A test page will verify your printer is working.
After this, you should try out Google Cloud Print so you can print from your phone and when you are on the road to your home printer.
Man and Keyboard 