Celia Laighton Thaxter

Celia Thaxter: (1835-1894) Eldest child of Thomas B. and Eliza Laighton was born at Portsmouth in New Hampshire, but when she was four her father was appointed keeper of the isolated White Island lighthouse located on the Southern tip of White Island the southernmost island in a cluster of nine islands known as the Isles of Shoals which are 10 miles off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire.

Celia had two brothers Cedric (b1840) and Oscar (b1841).

In 1847 when Celia was 12 her father and business partner, Levi Thaxter, built a resort hotel with 100 windows on the largest island in the Isles of Shoals cluster. At the same time the islands was renamed from the unprepossessing Hog Island to Appldore Island. The hotel was logically called Appledore House.

Guest at the hotel included Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry David Thoreau, William Morris Hunt, Childe Hassam, Lucy Larcom, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

Levi Thaxter who had graduated from Harvard, and was 11 years Celia’s senior, became tutor to the Thaxter children, and from Celia’s letters we learn she was enamored with Levi. Levi loaned $2,500 to Thomas Laighton on the eve of his engagement to the 15 year old Celia. They were married in 1851 when she was 16.

Levi, an actor, was well known for his readings, especially of Robert Browning poems. When Levi died in 1884, Robert Browning penned an epitaph.

The Thaxter’s had three sons John and Karl and Roland early in the marriage before it was blighted with many separations. From the late 1860s she and her husband spent most of their time apart,

Roland Thaxter (b. 1858) became professor of botany at Harvard in 1891.

Her books include

• Poems (1872 and 1874)
• Among the Isles of Shoals (1873)
• Drift Weed (1879)
• Poems for Children (1884)
• Idylls and Pastorals (1886)
• The Cruise of the Mystery (1886)
• An Island Garden (1894)

Her poems include:

• Land-Locked
• Alone
• Imprisoned
• The Pimpernel
• Sorrow
• Regre