Poets

Celia Laighton Thaxter was an American writer of poetry and stories. She was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Life and work

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 a son, Roland, born August 28, 1858, who would later become a prominent plant pathologist. Her first published poem, Landlocked, was written during this time on the mainland. 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 Whitteir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and th..