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

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.

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.

"This book accompanies the exhibition "Writing the Garden" organized in 2011 by the New York Society Library."

These letters of a man deeply concerned about his country, directly involved in political action, and torn, as the Civil War approached, by the conflict between his abolitionist zeal and his Quaker pacifism--letters here collected for the first time and many of them hitherto unpublished--shatter the stereotype of Whittier as "the good gray poet." The many letters to such figures as John Quincy Adams, Charles Sumner, and William Lloyd Garrison form a detailed record of the abolitionist movement from its inception to its merging with the Free Soil party in the 1850s. The first two volumes reproduce all the extant letters from 1828 to 1860, with full annotations. The last volume is selective, excluding several thousand perfunctory items and including only the historically or biographically interesting letters of the last three decades of the poet's life.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Gendered Ecologies considers the value of interrelationships that exist among human, nonhuman species, and inanimate objects, featuring observations by women writers as recorded in texts. The edition presents a case for transnational women writers, participating in the discourse of natural philosophy from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries.