Abolitionism, part of the wider political and literary context informing Eliza Hamilton Dunlop's best-known poem ‘The Aboriginal Mother’ (1838), presents a major challenge to characterizations of colonial women's poetry as apolitical. Abolitionist literary activism proliferated in the widely circulated European and North American print culture of the early nineteenth century. As Jennifer DeVere Brody suggests, the period between the abolition of the slave trade in England in 1807 and the end of the American Civil war in 1865 was central in the proliferation of narratives engaging with abolition, and ‘an era of increasing philanthropy for the enslaved African fostered by abolitionist activism’. Clare Midgley points out that it was during this period, from the 1790s to 1850s, that imperialist and feminist discourses ran parallel. Dunlop's poetry, considered in the wider contexts of transnational Romanticism and anti-slavery literary culture, reveals her influence in transposing a genderconscious Romanticism to colonial Australian poetry. Dunlop's periodical poetry, such as ‘The Irish Mother’ (1838) published in the Australian (1824–48) and ‘Morning on Rostrevor Mountains’ (1835) in the Dublin Penny Journal (1832–36), read within the contexts of transnational and imperial women's poetic traditions, challenges received conceptions of settler women's poetry in colonial Australia as not only geographically isolated but also isolated from the major ideas, questions and concerns of the time and consequently not engaged politically.

During her lifetime, Dunlop's poetry appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines in Ireland, as well as in England, India and Australia. She was known and highly regarded as a poet through her contributions to colonial Australian newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald (1842–54), the Australian (1824–48), the Empire (1850–75), the Atlas (1844–49) and the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (1843–93). While the few biographical accounts tend to list only one or two newspapers, she was published widely over 50 years, and her verse appeared in at least two books. International journals noted in Margaret De Salis’ biography include the Belfast Magazine, the Globe, the Dublin Penny Journal, Blackwood's and the Bengal Hurkaru in India.