Cold cases and true crime captivate us because they leave behind a void, begging to be filled with narrative. When we don’t have answers, we create stories to help us understand. It’s part of what it means to be human—to try and make sense of the senseless, to find meaning in the inexplicable.
My novels have often been inspired by lost-to-time stories, ones that linger in the spaces between fact and fiction. But for The Story She Left Behind, the tale came without answers.
Born in 1914, Barbara Newhall Follett was a prodigious literary talent. By the age of three, she was consumed with letters and their patterns, with the musical sound of a typewriter. The opening lines of a story she wrote when she was six years old began, “Once upon a time, though I can’t say exactly when…” and the words never stopped, the stories formed in her wild imagination.
By the age of 8, eschewing friends her own age, she wrote The House Without Windows, a fantastical novel about a young girl who leaves her home to live in nature, ultimately becoming one with the wild. The first version of this novel was lost in a house fire but was rewritten and published by Knopf in 1927 when Barbara was just 12. It was hailed by The New York Times as the work of an “unbridled genius.”
Barbara’s life was marked by an insatiable curiosity and a desire for adventure. She often lived in a fantasy world, surrounding herself with imaginary friends she called Mozart and Bach. She not only wrote novels but also invented an entire language called Farksoo, the lexicon complete with syntax and conjugated verbs.
However, her idyllic and imaginative childhood ended abruptly when her father, Wilson Follett, left the family for a younger woman. This betrayal shattered Barbara’s world emotionally and financially. She and her mother, Helen, embarked on a nomadic life, traveling across the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the time she was 15 in 1930, Barbara had run away from an oppressive household in Pasadena, living under an alias before being discovered by police. Her teenage years were filled with writing, working odd jobs and seeking solace in the wilderness.
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Though she continued to write, the Great Depression made publishing opportunities scarce. She had another book, titled The Voyage of the Norman D published in 1928, followed by two more books published posthumously.
By the early 1930s, she’d fallen in love with Nickerson Rogers, a Dartmouth graduate who shared her love for adventure. Together, they hiked the Appalachian Trail, traveled through Spain and the Swiss Alps and lived off the kindness of strangers. Yet, despite these halcyon days with Nick in the natural world, Barbara’s personal struggles deepened.
In 1934, they married and settled into a domestic life in Brookline, Mass. But Barbara was never cut out to be a housewife and Nick’s adultery was a devastating blow. Determined to save her marriage, Barbara fought to win him back — until, on the night of Dec. 7, 1939, she walked out of their apartment and was never seen again.
Nick reported her missing two weeks after she left him. He initially assumed she had “run away,” as she had done before, but concern grew when she failed to communicate with any friends or family. A year later, Barbara’s father, Wilson Follett, wrote an article in The Atlantic, titled To a Daughter One Year Lost, pleading for her to make contact. But she never did.
No body was found. No letters surfaced. No clues led to her whereabouts.
“If Barbara wanted to disappear, I can’t imagine anyone doing a better job of it,” her half nephew, Stefan Cooke states on his website Farksolia, devoted to Barbara and her work.
Theories about Barbara’s disappearance abound. Did she escape into the wilderness, mirroring the fate of her main character in The House Without Windows, who ultimately vanishes into the fairy realm? Did she take her own life, overwhelmed by despair? Her fate remains one of literature’s most haunting unsolved mysteries, drawing the fascination of scholars, writers and literary enthusiasts.
In addition to her father’s missive in The Atlantic, articles in The Guardian, Outside Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as an NPR podcast, have attempted to solve this cold case. Her biography, Barbara, The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius was published in 1966, written by a psychiatrist named Harold Grier McCurdy with Barbara’s mother, Helen. Barbara’s nephew, Stefan Cooke, released Barbara’s collected letters in 2015. And still, after all of this speculation, there are no firm answers to her vanishing.
Barbara’s life is not just a cold case; it reflects a brilliant mind trapped in circumstances beyond her control. She lived as she wrote — on the edge of the extraordinary, reaching for something just beyond the horizon. Her literary legacy, preserved in archives at Columbia University, offers glimpses into her mind but no definitive answers to her fate.
How much of an author’s psyche is revealed in her work? Even in fiction, might there be clues to their state of mind inside their stories? Maybe the answer to Barbara’s vanishing was hidden inside her imaginative tales.
The final lines of The House Without Windows read: “She was a fairy — a wood nymph. She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have mind to believe, eyes to see. To those she is ever present, the spirit of Nature, a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.”
With no clear ending to Barbara’s story, I had only one choice: to create my own. This is what novelists often do — we pull at the threads until a story emerges. Much like true crime enthusiasts, we search for meaning in the clues left behind. We want the narrative to make sense. But like many cold cases, as with Barbara Newhall Follett, the meaning can only be realized in fiction.
The Story She Left Behind is a mystery that follows the disappearance of a prodigy author named Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham who leaves behind an 8-year-old daughter named Clara, a husband, and a sequel to her famous novel written in a secret language she created. Twenty-five years later, in 1952, Clara receives a call from a British man claiming that Bronwyn’s lost papers have been discovered in a private library in London. Clara and her young daughter, Wynnie embark on a perilous journey to discover the truth of Bronwyn’s vanishing and possibly translate the story she left behind.
Though my novel is not directly about Barbara, it is inspired by her work, her life, her invented language and her disappearance. But unlike Barbara’s real life, The Story She Left Behind does reveal the fate of a vanished child prodigy. For someone who was as dedicated to language and story as Barbara was, I can’t help but think this is an homage she would appreciate.
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The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry comes out March 18 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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