How Elizabeth Barrett Browning's works were a medium for social change.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a captivating writer. Her works included poems about the injustice of slavery. She also used her poems to unmask the cruelties of child labor. Her novel Aurora Leigh, was written about the oppression of women by society. Her literary works included themes that fought social injustice and demanded social reformation. Although her works won her critical acclaim, many critics opposed Elizabeth's more politically active works, therefore decreasing her popularity. .
Elizabeth Barrett was born in 1806, in Durham, England. She was the eldest of twelve children born to Edward Barrett Moulin Barrett and Mary Graham Clarke. Elizabeth Barrett grew up in her family's estate Hope End, in Henfordshire. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations that relied on slave labor in order to prosper. Although Elizabeth never lived at the plantations, she watched her younger siblings be sent off by her father to Jamaica. This upset her greatly, and helped fuel her bitter opposition to the slave trade (Radley 12). In Barrett's poem "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" She writes, .
I am black, I am black!.
And yet God made me they say.
Piscopo 2 .
But if he did so, smiling back.
He must have cast his work away.
Under the feet of his white creatures,.
With a look of scorn, -- that the dusky features.
Might be trodden again to clay .
(22-28).
The quote is about a slave that is expressing her disbelief God could have created her to .
