Celia Thaxter: Selected Writings Paperback – by Julia Older (Editor)

Here for the first time in one volume are substantial excerpts from the major works of Celia Thaxter (1835-1894), one of America's most talented and versatile writers.

The anthology is introduced by an in-depth profile of Celia who grew up on the Isles of Shoals, a cluster of windswept islands nine miles off the Maine / New Hampshire coast. She married her childhood tutor and when the marriage dissolved Thaxter, who by then was a published poet, returned to write on the Shoals.

During the idyllic summers, she invited Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, Childe Hassam, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Longfellow and other artistic luminaries to her island cottage. In effect, she had founded the first American artist colony.