During Phillis Wheatley’s trip to London in 1773, her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published. Wheatley, a Black poet who was enslaved by a family in Boston, was a social success in London in part because of her literary talent. That she was enslaved in the American colonies also drew attention in the wake of a recent legal decision that found slavery to be contrary to English law. In theory, the law freed any enslaved people who arrived in England. Wheatley returned to Boston in September 1773 and was freed by her enslavers the following month. Some scholars believe that she made her freedom a condition of her return from England.