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Celia Thaxter, one of the most popular American poets of the late nineteenth century, lived on the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. Nathaniel Hawthorne called her the "Island Miranda," a reference perhaps to both William Shakespeare's The Tempest (circa 1611) and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Lucy Larcom called her an "enchantress." Most people who met her remarked upon her striking beauty, gracious manner, and captivating conversation. Among her friends were many of the famous literati of New England, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields, and her husband, publisher James Fields. Thaxter's life and her writing career, like those of many nineteenth-century women, were simultaneously inhibited and propelled by her domestic and financial responsibilities. She managed to support herself through writing and achieved recognition for her poetry. Though she was known primarily as a poet and often dismissed her ability to write prose, her poetic ability enabled her to write prose that confronts and describes the beauty and horrors of human experience with a realistic forthrightness and an elegant attention to detail.
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