An Island Garden - Hardcover

Thaxter, Celia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1567926436 ISBN 13: 9781567926439

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2019

Synopsis

Though Celia Thaxter had always thought of herself first and foremost as a poet, it is her Island Garden for which she is remembered. This, a collection of remembrances and advice from her summers gardening on Appledore Island among the Isles of Shoals, was originally published in 1894, shortly before her death. Her father, Thomas Laighton, a linchpin of the nineteenth-century New England cultural scene, ran the Appledore House Hotel, which became a salon for many prominent writers and artists, including figures such Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Jewett, and Whittier. Childe Hassam, the famous American Impressionist whose delicate watercolor paintings appear throughout this volume, treasured his summers spent with these jolly, refined, interesting and artistic set of people... like one large family. Celia's garden, on this same island, was admired by her friends and neighbors, and her picturesque language captures its stretching stems and blossoming flowers in vivid prose, ranging in mood from bitter defeat delivered by unrelenting slugs to the exultant triumph of birdsong and bursting blooms. For over a century, An Island Garden has served as an example of the very best garden writing has to offer, and inspiration for all writers of prose.

About this title

About the Author:

Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) was an American writer and poet whose work centered around island gardens and the sea, having grown up among the Isles of Shoals just off the New Hampshire coast. Her father owned and operated the Appledore Hotel, where the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Sarah Orne Jewett would reside. Upon leaving the Isles for Newtonville, Massachusetts in 1856, Thaxter grew homesick for the sea of her youth. Thaxter turned to verse in order to express her love for the Isles, blending together the didactic with the emotional. Her poetry gained recognition following the 1861 publication of "Land-Locked" in The Atlantic Monthly. She is considered one of America's favorite authors in the late 19th century.

About this edition

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1567926436
• ISBN 13: 9781567926439
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 156
• Illustrator: Hassam Childe