March 3, 2026

Coastal Hauntings and New England Regionalism:Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett

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Ghost stories in the works of Thaxter and Jewett act as reflections on personal and regional histories, uniting communities with shared experiences.
The analysis highlights the importance of spectral apparitions along Maine's coast as symbols of both local and global connections.
Attention to colonial history enhances the understanding of American literary regionalism through the lens of spectral encounters.
Such ghost narratives emphasize the intricate networks between seemingly isolated communities and the wider world, informing the concept of the 'globalgothic.'

Resumen

This chapter examines the haunted coast in the New England regionalist writing of Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett. Packham emphasises how attention to spectral apparitions haunting the shorelines—of Maine and further afield—helps us see American literary regionalism as a mode of writing substantially concerned with what lies beyond its immediate shores and with the US’s colonial history. Within the work of Thaxter and Jewett, ghost stories are offered as meditations on personal and regional histories and serve as a suture for communities—holding community together via a particular shared history. But these ghosts also take the region and its inhabitants out of themselves—gesturing towards the wider networks in which the seemingly out-of-the-way communities prized by literary regionalists remain bound up. Such ghosts may be read, then, as understated representatives of the “globalgothic,” illuminating spectral connections between the regional and the wider world.

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