With their themes of domestic love and private desire, a narrative of the heart rather than an account, like Aurora Leigh, of the public life of the writer, the Sonnets (a traditional poetic form rather than an innovative one) have disappointingly seemed the work of a different poet from the writer of the inventive, daring poems of social critique. Next to these examples of Barrett Browning's work, the sonnet sequence has appeared, to some, tame and conventional. `A Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' (an anti-slavery poem told from the position of a persecuted female slave), Aurora Leigh (a novel in verse about a woman writer's struggle with authorship and love) and the protest poem about child labour, `The Cry of the Children', were each plainly political. Feminist critics have sometimes been restless with Elizabeth Barrett Browning s Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850).
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