"Destruction of the Roehampton Estate," Adolphe Duperly (1833); Portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (London, 1889-90)

In the scope of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's (hereafter EBB) poetic ouevre, five poems can be identified as addressing, whether overtly or obliquely, the ongoing issue of slavery. Each piece marks a particular moment in EBB's ideological trajectory, moving from her juvenilia, represented in “The African” (early 1820s), to apprenticeship poems like "The Appeal" (1833), to her much-discussed mature works “The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” (1850), and “A Curse for a Nation” (1856). By contextualizing these particular pieces both within their respective historical moments and our own contemporary perspectives, this COVE edition seeks to explore the nuances of power relations inherent in ongoing issues of race, gender, and class, seen in both the dynamics inherent in EBB's positionality as a white woman descended from a plantation-owning family, writing about the plight of enslaved people, and the broader system of racial inequity that persists into the present.