Babbitt has stated that her portrait of the ocean in The Eyes of the Amaryllis owes much to her first, childhood view of Lake Erie, and to her love of the Atlantic coast. Similar to Dick Foote and the Shark (1967), this story is set on Cape Cod of an earlier era, perhaps the early nineteenth century. The book superbly evokes the storm-ridden, treacherous Cape Cod shoreline with its miles of driftwood-strewn, sandy beaches and its lonely, white-painted board houses.

Surrounded by the wildness and isolation of the coast, it is possible to believe that the spirits of drowned sailors still haunt the shoreline. These ghostly figures might still sail their decaying, eerily-glowing ships across the bottom of the Atlantic at midnight.