During her life, Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) was one of the most celebrated writers of her time, while Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was known only to a small cherished group of family and friends. The two women never met, but would have been known to each other through Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a leading figure in the 19th-century literary culture centered in New England. In Transport of the Aim, Maxine Silverman imagines the inner lives of these two women (and other literary figures of their time), connected in her poetic meditations through their mutual passion for gardening, their love of place - Appledore on the Isle of Shoals for Thaxter, Amherst, MA, for Dickinson - and their shared experience as female writers in the patriarchal culture of the time.