Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

Thaxter, Celia Laighton.

[An early letter to a friend on the mainland.]

Appledore [Island], Maine, 30 June 1850. 12mo (7.75” x 5”). ALS, 4 pp.

A early letter by Celia Thaxter (née Laighton) to her friend Martha Kuhn of Boston, revealing her lively social life at the age of fifteen, and exploring her courtship with her tutor and future-husband, Levi Thaxter.

This letter was composed three years after the earliest letter Thaxter is known to have written, which is also addressed to Kuhn, written from Hog Island (later changed to Appledore) and dated 16 Dec. 1847. In that early letter, Thaxter—aged twelve—informed Kuhn of her new tutor (and future husband)—Levi Thaxter (1824–1884), and noted her father was building the Appledore Hotel. Born in Boston, Martha Anne Kuhn (1827–1891) studied art in Europe in 1854, and was a member of the New England’s Women’s Club and the Massachusetts Society for the Advancement of the University Education of Women. Kuhn was a scholar and linguist, whose friends also included John Greenleaf Whittier and Louisa M. Alcott.

Writing here at the age of fifteen, Thaxter opens by explaining to Kuhn why she did not see her the last time she visited south Boston. While noting she presently has “so much correspondence from the south Boston folks” (these “many epistles, all clamorous for immediate answers, which came snowing down upon me”), she observes: “your claims are of more weight”—“each day that passed without the note to you, was widening the gap between us, and shaking the foundations of our friendship we pleasantly began.” She takes the opportunity to “commence anew the correspondence,” assuring Kuhn: “you shall not find me such a tardy correspondent as I was before.” After recounting their ‘missed connection’ at Mrs. Kemble’s reading of Romeo and Juliet in Boston, she expresses her hope that Kuhn will visit her on Appledore Island in the summer and asks if she remembers “the lady of the white dress.” She notes that Mr. Thaxter of White Island remembers Kuhn distinctly, further observing: “You don’t know how sober he has become, dear Martha, he never ‘takes off the ladies,’ as mother says now. Mother laughs as merrily as in the White Island days.” This may indicate that Thaxter’s courtship with Celia had become decisive. She then describes her mother, father, and two brothers, and addresses her growth in recent years: “I? Am I altered? It seems to me I must have grown much older—for I feel remarkably aged…Only think yesterday I was fifteen!…I think it must be I have changed more now than all the rest, but come, and judge for yourself.” She closes the letter by relating the secret that when Kuhn visited White Island Celia’s mother “fell in love” with her.

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Celia Laighton Thaxter (1835–1894) spent her childhood on the nearby Isles of Shoals, first on White Island, where her father was lighthouse keeper, and then on Appledore Island, where her father had built Appledore House Hotel. After marrying and living on the mainland—during which time she launched her literary career—she returned to Appledore for the warmer months, becoming hostess of the hotel. Living in a cottage next door where she cultivated her famed flower garden, Thaxter became the presiding spirit of one of the first artist colonies in the U.S., welcoming to the island and her home such luminaries as Ralph W. Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry W. Longfellow, John Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Morris Hunt and others. Among those closest to her was impressionist painter Childe Hassam, who painted several portraits of Thaxter, and whose paintings of her garden are reproduced as chromolithographs in Thaxter’s An Island Garden, published in the last year of her life. A successful poet and essayist, Thaxter was also a gifted visual artist, taking lessons from Hassam and others, and focusing her skills on the illumination of copies of her books and the decoration of ceramics, transferring to both “the wonders and splendors of nature,” which she observed in her garden and elsewhere.

REFERENCES: Earliest Letter by Celia Thaxter at seacoastnh.com

CONDITION: Very good, no losses to the text.

Item #6294

Sold