Among the Isles of Shoals

Celia Thaxter was already a popular poet when she began to publish the essays of Among the Isles of Shoals in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869; they were an immediate sensation. Charles Dickens called Thaxter’s essays “admirable” and Horace Greeley declared, “The best prose writing I have seen for a long time is Mrs. Thaxter’s ‘Isles of Shoals’ in the Atlantic. Her pen-pictures are wonderfully well-done.”

Published as a book in 1873, Among the Isles of Shoals remained equally popular, printed not …