Celia Thaxter
| Celia Thaxter | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
June 29, 1835 Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States |
| Died | August 25, 1894 (aged 58) Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, Maine United States |
| Occupation | Poet and writer |
Celia Laighton Thaxter (June 29, 1835 – August 25, 1894) was an American writer of poetry and stories. She was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Thaxter grew up in the Isles of Shoals, first on White Island, where her father, Thomas Laighton, was a lighthouse keeper, and then on Smuttynose and Appledore Islands.
When she was sixteen, she married Levi Thaxter and moved to the mainland, residing first in Watertown, Massachusetts, at a property his father owned. In 1854, they accepted an offer to use a house in Newburyport. The couple then acquired their own home, today called the Celia Thaxter House, built in 1856 near the Charles River at Newtonville. She had two sons, one of whom was Roland, born August 28, 1858, who would later become a prominent mycologist who taught at Harvard where he studied insect-associated fungi and Myxobacteria. 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.
Her life with Levi was not harmonious and she missed her islands, and so after 10 years away, she moved back to Appledore Island.
Celia 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, who painted several pictures of her. The watercolorist Ellen Robbins also 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. In 2008, The Library of America selected "A Memorable Murder" for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime.
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