Conservative writers depicted émigrés sentimentally as virtuous, suffering aristocrats persecuted by cruel monarchists, presenting Britain as an idealized nation of liberty.

Progressive writers, including Smith, depicted the poverty and isolation of émigrés in Britain to critique the xenophobia of laws like the Aliens Act, the inequality of British society generally, and the danger of nationalism itself.

In November 1792, recent events included the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the September Massacres, reflecting a newly violent anti-monarchist turn led by Maximilien Robespierre.

The woman's aristocratic husband arrives to interrupt her reverie, and the poem's speaker reflects that men in both France and England fail to understand that "worth alone is true Nobility,"[6] overvaluing titles and wealth.

/ Who feed on England's vitals,"[7] namely, British politicians,[1] who rise to new and unmerited wealth through exploitation, and who should learn from the émigrés a lesson that oppression will not be endured indefinitely.

The arrival of spring tempts the poem's speaker with hopeful feelings, but her years of personal sorrow weigh too heavily on her, as does her horror at recent violence.

The book closes with a prayer to God: "May lovely Freedom, in her genuine charms, / Aided by stern but equal Justice, drive / From the ensanguin'd earth the hell-born fiends / Of Pride, Oppression, Avarice, and Revenge, / That ruin what thy mercy made so fair!

In 1792, she wrote to the bookseller J. Dodsley for advice on publishing The Emigrants, saying it is written "in the way of the Task--only of course inferior to it" and saying that the final draft of the poem "will be corrected by the very first of our present Poets--Cowper.