“She would be invisible forever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.” — The House Without Windows (p. 205)

In 2002-ish, when I was graduating high school, the big literary sensation was Christopher Paolini’s fantasy novel, Eragon. This was partly because The Lord of the Rings movies and the Harry Potter books and movies had led to a big revival in fantasy as a genre, and partly because of the fact that Paolini had largely written it as a fifteen/sixteen-year-old, and the publishing world loves a compelling authorial backstory. Although nineteen by the time the book was released—first by Paolini’s parents’ small publishing firm, and then by Knopf in the span of that year—people were marketing Paolini as a teenaged literary prodigy in addition to being the Next Big Thing. Not that nineteen isn’t an impressively young age to release a bestselling book, but up until I was writing this, I had thought that Paolini was sixteen when the novel was released, and instead he’s a year older than I am. Such is the power of publisher marketing.

I bring up Christopher Paolini because as I was learning about author Barbara Newhall Follett and reading her debut novel, The House Without Windows, I was immediately struck by the parallels between the two. Both were homeschooled by parents in the publishing world (in case you’re wondering how teenagers were able to get their books to press so quickly), and both found significant early success, with critics hailing them as prodigies. While both remained popular with follow-up works, one could characterize their later careers as solid, but perhaps not setting the world on fire as initially anticipated. Fortunately for Paolini, this is where the parallels end, because Follett’s later life has more in common with Theodosia Burr than the average writer.

Barbara Newhall Follett was born in 1914 to literary parents. Her father, Wilson Follett, was a well-respected editor and critic (as well as a Pulitzer-nominated novelist), and her mother, Helen Thomas Follett was a well-known author of children’s writing. Helen taught both Barbara and her younger sister, Sabra, herself, and her elder daughter showed an aptitude for writing at an early age—reported to have been composing poetry by age four. This is the same age that the introduction to the 2021 reissue says that Barbara snuck into her father’s study and carried off his typewriter so she could do her own writing (THWW, xv). The story that would become THWW began as a present to her mother from an eight-year-old Barbara, to be completed by her ninth birthday. Given her own typewriter, she produced a 40,000-word manuscript just a few days late of her original deadline. It was the story of a young girl named Eepersip who leaves home one day to live a quietly adventurous in the forest by herself.

Catastrophically, this original version of her first novel would be lost in a house fire mere days after its presentation. But rather than scrapping the idea, Follett would spend much of the next three years rewriting and reshaping the manuscript from memory. The second version of THWW was completed when its author was twelve, and her parents thought it was polished enough to seek publication. Much like Christopher Paolini’s parents, they both had extensive publishing connections to draw from, but even better for Follett was that her father was working as an editor for—ironically—Knopf and could easily midwife the project along.

The second version of THWW, the one we have, ostensibly follows the same story as its predecessor. Its protagonist, Eepersip Eigleen, is leading a perfectly ordinary life with her parents at the edge of a forest when she decides she wants to explore the neighboring forest and meadowlands. This spontaneous jaunt of a few days turns permanent when Eepersip just chooses not to go home—not because she hates her parents, but rather because she vastly prefers Nature to civilization. Eepersip’s wanderings take her from the meadow, to the seaside, and eventually to the mountains, where she has a variety of experiences and adventures, though most of these episodes have more in common with the little things that happen to exploring children than grand, heart-stopping genre tales.

For a tween, Follett’s prose, especially when she’s describing the natural world and her delight in it, is very sophisticated, but I think what makes THWW interesting as a piece of literature is the unsettling element of old-style fairytale menace running beneath this otherwise light children’s story. When Eepersip first leaves her parents’ house, much of her time living in the meadow is punctuated by various attempts by them and neighboring adults to kidnap her back home, efforts she strenuously resists. These episodes, and some contingent ones at the seaside, are played as comedic and Eepersip has a Peter Pan-esque delight in evading them, but they are still somewhat unnerving, particularly to read as an older reader. More disturbing still are Eepersip’s own attempts to later entice other children away from their families to come live with her in the wild, including her own sister. None of these efforts are successful, and she never forces her playmates to stay against their will, but it felt like something directly out of the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. The Andersen bit particularly comes through in the novel’s somewhat ambiguous ending, quoted in my flavor text, where Eepersip eventually rises into the air and fades away—transformed into a nymph, at one with her wilderness forever.

THWW was published in 1927 with an initial run of 2,500 copies—a significant printing for an unknown author, particularly at the time—and sold out two weeks prior to release (another boon of having your dad able to muster Knopf’s marketing department behind your preorders). Follett became an overnight sensation, and in addition to interest in her next novel, she was eagerly courted as a literary columnist, especially for reviews of current children’s literature. She wrote, did radio interviews, and attended adult publishing events, but Follett was very much still a young girl with a personality similar to her first novel’s heroine. She loved camping, hiking, and rowing, so her work rarely seemed to interfere with her attachment to the outdoors. Indeed, the one continued to fuel the other. For her follow-up to THWW, Follett want to write a sea novel, but after doing as much research as she could from New Hampshire, she decided it wasn’t enough. So at thirteen, she signed on as a cabin girl on a schooner bound for Nova Scotia and spent the intervening months learning about shipping. She returned with a finished manuscript, The Voyage of the Norman D, which was subsequently released in 1928 to more positive reviews.

But for Follett, this was where some of the fairytale begins to unravel. That same year, her father left the family for another woman, and the next plunged the world into the Depression years. Wilson Follett appears to have been unwilling (possibly unable) to support his abandoned family, so Barbara and her mother had to make their own way. They collaborated on articles to sell to magazines and newspapers, and Barbara also took secretarial jobs to help make ends meet. Surviving left little time for writing or the outdoor activities Follett lived for, but she did work on several unpublished manuscripts during this time and occasionally escaped her desk work for the forest or the sea.

At seventeen, she met her future husband, Nickerson Rogers, who shared her passion for nature. They would spend the next three years hiking the Appalachian Trail and backpacking across Europe together, returning stateside in 1934 to marry and find some kind of regular employment. Follett was still writing when she could, but times had changed and none of her new projects were able to land a publisher (another reason I maintain that, in addition to talent, her deadbeat dad hustling for her probably helped her the first two times). Within a few years, feeling creatively constrained and increasingly trapped in a difficult marriage with Rogers, Follett’s lettters to family and friends became increasingly despondent. Then, according to her husband, Follet stormed out of their house in Brookline, Massachusetts on December 7, 1939 with thirty dollars and the clothes on her back. She was never seen again. She was twenty-five.

Much like Theo Burr’s disappearance, there are many theories as to Follett’s ultimate fate. Naturally to our culturally true crime-addled brains, domestic murder most foul is extremely popular, and the circumstantial evidence against Nickerson Rogers is potentially very damning. Aside from their ongoing marital problems, which included accusations of infidelity by Follett against her husband, there remain two main strikes against Rogers: he was the last person to see Follett alive, and he waited two weeks to report her missing. These circumstances, combined with Rogers’ generally nonchalant attitude toward his wife’s disappearance, led Follett’s mother to at least accuse him of culpability in the failure of efforts to find her, if not of her actual death. Certainly, neither Rogers nor the Brookline Police appear to have been Johnny on the spot vis à vis a serious investigation. Compounding the delay in reporting her disappearance, Rogers and the police didn’t even issue a missing person’s bulletin until March 1940, and since that bulletin listed only her married name, any remaining name recognition Follett might have retained with the public—which might have led to wider coverage of her case—was wasted. All of this stated, it should be made clear that while no evidence was ever found by the police to exonerate Rogers, no evidence was found against him, either.

Unfortunately, her husband’s hands aren’t the only ones that might have possibly done Follett harm. Besides stranger danger, it must be acknowledged that at the time she went missing, Follett was deeply depressed and medicating with barbiturates, so suicide can’t be entirely ruled out as a possible cause of death. The largest hurdle to this conclusion is the lack of a body, but author Daniel Mills has conjectured that Follett’s body was found but misidentified by the police. Nine years after her disappearance, the police found the remains of an unidentified woman about half a mile from the property Follett and her husband had been renting. This woman was found with a bottle of barbiturates, and her attire was consistent with Follett’s age and possessions when she went missing. The police identified the woman as another missing person and ruled the death a suicide, but Mills argues that by the time the body was discovered, the police had no remaining records of Follett’s disappearance and no reason to check to see if it was her.

I would argue that the final theory is the most tantalizing, because it is the one that sounds like what Follett would have written herself—if she indeed had any agency in her fate as she slammed the door of her house behind her. And that is that perhaps the once-child creator of the fierce, whimsical Eepersip Eigleen decided that she’d written her destiny thirteen years earlier, and it was time to simply vanish. In his defense, that’s probably what her husband thought (assuming he didn’t kill her). To pick up a new life in another anonymous city, to be a sort of midcentury hermitess in the woods she loved so much, to take to the sea again—in short, to return to when her life had beauty and wonder. As a woman and as a writer, this is obviously the end I wish for her, but no matter which death is the “real” one, Follett’s nymphic spirit lives on in her words and, like all those who revel in wild places, in those unexplainable spaces where we and the natural world touch.