Thaxter, Celia Laighton

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THAXTER, Celia Laighton

Born 29 June 1835, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died 26 August 1894, Appledore Island, Isles of Shoals, Maine

Daughter of Thomas B. and Eliza Rymes Laighton; married Levi L. Thaxter, 1851 (separated); children: three sons

Raised on a lighthouse island in the Isles of Shoals 10 miles off the New Hampshire coast, Celia Laighton Thaxter grew up within the sound and sight of the sea and early learned to appreciate its beauty and its cruelty. This dual awareness became a major theme in her poetry, which established her literary reputation at a relatively young age.

Thaxter's father became the lighthouse keeper when she was four years old. She, her father, mother, and two brothers were the sole human inhabitants of the island for many years. In 1841 the family moved to another of the islands, Smutty-Nose, where they began receiving paying summer guests. As this proved a successful venture, Thomas Laighton in 1847 began building a resort hotel on Appledore Island, the largest of the Shoals island group. This he completed in 1848 with the help of Levi L. Thaxter, a young Harvard graduate.

The Appledore House opened the following year and became a major summer resort attracting artists and writers including Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier, Lowell, Mark Twain, Charlotte Cushman, Ole Bull, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Adams Fields, and Childe Hassam. Hassam completed a series of remarkable paintings of the islands, including some of Thaxter in her garden (1892), which are now in the Smithsonian. Many of these artists were attracted by Thaxter as well as by the scenery, and she established a kind of literary salon on the islands beginning in the 1860s.

Levi Thaxter had become Celia's tutor in her early teens, and in 1851 they married and later had three sons. The marriage was not successful, as Thaxter pined for her island home when, off and on in the 1850s, they lived on the mainland in several Massachusetts towns. Levi, on the other hand, began to resent her literary success. By the end of the 1860s, Thaxter and her husband lived essentially separate lives, although they never divorced. She remained on Appledore with her mother and her oldest son Karl, who was developmentally disadvantaged.

The death of her mother in 1877 was a severe shock to Thaxter, precipitating a religious crisis wherein she attempted to communicate through seances with her mother. This endeavor may have inspired a similar experience described fictionally by Sarah Orne Jewett in her spiritualistic story, "The Foreigner" (1900). Although a religious skeptic in her early years, Thaxter did turn to spiritualism, theosophy, and Eastern religions in her later years.

Thaxter was an extraordinarily accomplished watercolorist; this is an overlooked aspect of her considerable talent. Her prose publications, Among the Isles of Shoals (1873) and An Island Garden (1894), also remain as gems of descriptive prose.

Thaxter's first poem, significantly entitled "Land-Locked," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1861. She continued to publish poems in the major literary journals of her day, namely Scribner's, Harper's, the Independent, the Century, and the Atlantic. She also published juvenile material in Our Young Folks and St. Nicholas Magazine. The first collection of Thaxter's poetry, Poems, appeared in 1871. Many subsequent revised editions were printed.

Most of Thaxter's poetry deals with nature, not the benign nature of the Romantics, but a harsh, indifferent ocean. Several poems deal with actual shipwrecks that occurred on the Isles of Shoals while she was there. In "The Wreck of the Pocohantas," Thaxter asks: "Do purposeless thy children meet / Such bitter death? How was it best / These hearts should cease to beat?" She returns often in her poetry to this basic theological question. Thaxter's tones is sometimes bitter and despairing, and occasionally somewhat cynical about traditional religious explanations. At times her austere, harsh imagery anticipates that of 20th-century poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Probably some of Thaxter's bitterness, like theirs, stemmed from the frustrations she encountered trying to play the many and conflicting roles of wife, mother, and artist. These conflicts are apparent in her letters, published in 1895.

Other Works:

Drift-Weed (1878). Poems for Children (1884). The Cruise of the Mystery (1886). Idyls and Pastorals (1886). My Lighthouse, and Other Poems (1890). Stories and Poems for Children (1895). The Letters of Celia Thaxter (edited by A. A. Fields and R. Lamb, 1895). The Heavenly Guest, and Other Unpublished Writings (edited by O. Laighton, 1935).

Bibliography:

Faxon, S., et al., A Stern and Lovely Scene: A Visual History of the Isles of Shoals (1978). Hawthorne, N., The American Notebooks (1881). Laighton, O., Ninety Years at the Isles of Shoals (1930). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Thaxter, R., Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter (1962). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1951).