16 Facts About Celia Thaxter

Celia Thaxter was an American writer of poetry and stories.

Celia Thaxter Laighton was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, June 29,1835, but the family moved soon after to the Isles of Shoals, first on White Island, where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper of the Isles of Shoals Light, and then on Smuttynose and Appledore Islands.

The gradual addition of summer visitors to the fishing population came slowly, Celia Thaxter's father being the first to establish anything like a modern hotel.

On September 13,1851, at the age of 16, she married Levi Celia Thaxter and moved to the mainland, residing first in Watertown, Massachusetts, at a property his father owned.

The couple then acquired their own home, today called the Celia Thaxter House, built in 1856 near the Charles River at Newtonville.

Celia Thaxter's first published poem was written during this time on the mainland.

In 1879, Celia Thaxter suddenly became known upon the literary horizon with a collection of poems entitled Driftwood, and considering that they came from a group of islands, away from the mainland far enough to prevent frequent communication, the debuting work was received with almost as much surprise as pleasure.

Celia Thaxter's poetry appeared in the Atlantic, Century, Harper's, Independent, New England Magazine, and Scribner's, while her writing for juvenile audiences appeared in Our Young Folks and St Nicholas.

Celia Thaxter became the hostess of her father's hotel, the Appledore House, and welcomed many New England literary and artistic notables to the island and to her parlor, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam, the latter of whom painted several pictures of her.

Celia Thaxter was present at the time of the infamous murders on Smuttynose Island, about which she wrote the essay A Memorable Murder.

Celia Thaxter drowned in late summer 1879, three days after finishing his last sketch.

Celia Thaxter was buried not far from her cottage, which burned in the 1914 fire that destroyed The Appledore House hotel.

Celia Thaxter has done for the sea-shore and the varied aspects of ocean views and the rocky isles of her home, what Whittier has done for the milder aspects of the river on whose banks he dwelt.

Celia Thaxter was happy to have attracted, very early in her literary career, the sympathy and admiration of some of the best writers and critics of the day: among the most enthusiastic of her admirers, was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a scholar, who was a lover of the sea, and one of the most competent judges of ocean nature painting of literati from that time.

Celia Thaxter failed to discover any lack of versatility in her work, and those who study her works as a whole, will note that there is hardly a moral idea, a practical point in ethics, or an emotion of the human heart, which has not been the subject of her pen, touched upon at least, with more or less freedom.

Celia Thaxter wrote some charming poems for children, with such an exquisite blending of the didactic with the scenic and emotional, that the intended lesson was conveyed without exciting the natural repulsion of children to "morals," too obviously conveyed.