[6] The means of education were comparatively remote, and the permanent society of the islands for the greater part of the year offered very limited resources for a bright child.

[7] On September 13, 1851,[7] at the age of 16, she married Levi Thaxter and moved to the mainland, residing first in Watertown, Massachusetts, at a property his father owned.

[8] In 1879,[9] Thaxter suddenly became known upon the literary horizon with a collection of poems entitled Driftwood, and considering that they came from a group of islands, away from the mainland far enough to prevent frequent communication, the debuting work was received with almost as much surprise as pleasure.

Although stray poems of the ocean had been published, signed with the name of "Celia Thaxter", still it was difficult for the critical reviewer of Boston to realize that the bearer of this name was actually a long time resident, if not exactly a native of those isles lying off the coast of New Hampshire.

She became the hostess of her father's hotel, the Appledore House, and welcomed many New England literary and artistic notables to the island and to her parlor, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the artists William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam, the latter of whom painted several pictures of her.

[10] William Morris Hunt, a close family friend, spent the last months of his life on Appledore Island, trying to recover from a crippling depression.

That same year, the Thaxters bought 186 acres (75 hectares) along Seapoint Beach on Cutts Island, Kittery Point, where they built a grand Shingle Style "cottage" called Champernowne Farm.

In March 1888, her friend Whittier hoped "on that lonesome, windy coast where she can only look upon the desolate, winter-bitten pasture-land and the cold grey sea" she could be comforted by "memories of her Italian travels".

As he may be said to have exhausted the descriptive beauties of the Merrimac, Thaxter appears to have left nothing unsaid of the varying features of the ocean, whose waves were forever beating at her feet.

With the minutest attention to detail; with the keenest observation for shades of difference; with an almost superfine susceptibility to climatic and meteorological changes, so that she might be termed a realist in word-painting, she at the same time possessed the glow and the imagination of the impressionist.

This was untrue: her poems were not confined to the sea, as will be remembered with the story of "A Faded Glove," "Remonstrance," "Piccola," and scores of other verses giving land pictures; not to mention her musical sonnets on Beethoven and other great masters of composition.