Celia Laighton Thaxter was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on June 29th, 1835 and spent her childhood years on the Isles of Shoals, initially on White Island, where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper, and then the wonderfully named Smuttynose and Appledore Islands. At sixteen, she married Levi Thaxter, her father's business partner, and moved to the mainland, residing first in Watertown, Massachusetts, at a property his father owned. In 1854, they moved to a house in Newburyport and later, in 1856, acquired their own home near the Charles River at Newtonville. Celia had two sons, one of whom was Roland, born August 28, 1858, and would become a prominent mycologist who would later teach at Harvard. Her first published poem was written during this time on the mainland. That poem, "Land-Locked," was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1861 and earned her $10. It was to be the beginning of a career that would make her one of America's most popular poets and short story writers. Her marriage with Levi was not perfect, tensions gradually increased. After 10 years she moved back to the islands and her beloved Appledore Island. The marriage was not over but the separations grew longer as Levi didn't share his wife's love of island life. Celia became the hostess of her father's hotel, the Appledore House, and many New England literary and artists stayed thee; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the artists William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, who painted several pictures of her and watercolorist Ellen Robbins, who painted the flowers in her garden. Celia was present at the time of the infamous murders on Smuttynose Island, about which she wrote the essay, A Memorable Murder which we have included at the end of this volume of poetry. William Morris Hunt, a close family friend, trying to recover from a debilitating depression, drowned in late summer 1879, an apparent suicide, three days after finishing his last sketch. Celia bore the horror of discovering the body. That same year, the Thaxters' bought 186 acres on Seapoint Beach on Cutts Island, Kittery Point, where they built a grand Shingle Style "cottage" called Champernowne Farm. In 1880, they auctioned the Newtonville house, and in 1881, moved to their new home. In March 1888, her friend and fellow poet Whittier hoped "on that lonesome, windy coast where she can only look upon the desolate, winter-bitten pasture-land and the cold grey sea" she could be comforted by "memories of her Italian travels." Among Celia's most remembered and best loved poems are "The Burgomaster Gull," "Landlocked," "Milking," "The Great White Owl," "The Kingfisher," and "The Sandpiper." Celia Thaxter died suddenly on August 25th, 1894 on Appledore Island and is buried not far from her cottage, which later burned down in the 1914 fire that consumed The Appledore House hotel.

Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835-1894) was born in Portsmouth, NH. When she was four, her father became the lighthouse keeper on White Island in the Isles of Shoals. After resigning his post eight years later, he built a resort hotel on Appledore Island in Maine. The first of its kind on the New England coast, the hotel became a gathering place for writers and artists during the latter half of the 19th century. In her last year of life, Celia published this work, in which she lovingly describes her Appledore garden and its flowers. The flowers she grew in her cutting garden filled her own rooms and those of the hotel, and this work became famous for its descriptions of the old-fashioned flowers she grew there. Her island garden, a plot that measured 15 feet square, has been re-created and is open to visitors.

Discover an unexplored dimension of the life of a popular 19th-century gardener, poet, and personality

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Celia Thaxter was the most popular of America's woman poets, surpassing in importance many others whose names are better known today. Yet Celia's fame began to wane even before her death in 1894. Perhaps, as Jane Vallier suggests in this study of Thaxter's life, adverse financial circumstances forced the poet to try her hand as a folklorist, juvenile author, freelance journalist, dramatic actress, naturalist, and illustrator, as well. In this, the first extensive literary biography of Celia Thaxter, author Vallier explains the meaning and symbolism of Thaxter's poetry and describes how Celia's unhappy marriage and her life on the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of New Hampshire, colored her poetry and prose. Included in this reprint of the original 1982 edition is a new introduction with additional photographs, fifty-three of Thaxter's poems plus a reprint of "A Memorable Murder," the story of the killing of two women on Smuttynose Island in 1873 and first published in Atlantic Monthly.

Humorous verse and short fiction based on everyday life, in the Erma Bombeck vein. Author of Who Gets the Yellow Bananas, Duncanson is known for her Celia Thaxter and Emily Dickinson programs. Samuels is the author of Intense Experience: Social Psychology Through Poetry, and To Spade the Earth. --Peter E. Randall Publisher.

An intimate and authentic view of Celia Thaxter's life and times

This publication marks the first time in a hundred years that a wide range of nineteenth-century American women's poetry has been accessible to the general public in a single volume. Included are the humorous parodies of Phoebe Cary and Mary Weston Fordham and the stirring abolitionist poems of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, Maria Lowell, and Rose Terry Cooke. Included, too, are haunting reflections on madness, drug use, and suicide of women whose lives, as Cheryl Walker explains, were often as melodramatic as the poems they composed and published. In addition to works by more than two dozen poets, the anthology includes ample headnotes about each author's life and a brief critical evaluation of her work. Walker's introduction to the volume provides valuable contextual material to help readers understand the cultural background, economic necessities, literary conventions, and personal dynamics that governed women's poetic production in the nineteenth century.