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

Throughout her life, the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (hereafter EBB) critiqued not only American slavery but also European complicity in the slave trade. From her juvenilia, represented in the unpublished “The African” (early 1820s) to her more mature pieces, such as the anonymously published "The Appeal" (1833), “The Runaway Slave of Pilgrim’s Point” (1848), “Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave” (1850), and “A Curse for a Nation” (1856), EBB’s work is particularly notable for centering the experiences and voices of enslaved people themselves and drawing attention to their objectification and oppression. This COVE edition seeks to explore the nuances of such power relations, seen in both the dynamics of EBB, 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.