A Literary Mystery: A Guest Post by Patti Callahan Henry
An enchanting tale about the power of storytelling, complex family mythologies, language and love, Patti Callahan Henry’s latest can’t be missed. Read on for an exclusive essay from Patti on what inspired her to write her latest novel, The Story She Left Behind.
Hardcover
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$29.99
The Story She Left Behind: A Novel
The Story She Left Behind: A Novel
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$26.99
$29.99
Inspired by a true literary mystery, New York Times bestselling author of the mesmerizing The Secret Book of Flora Lea returns with the sweeping story of a legendary book, a lost mother, and a daughter’s search for them both.
Inspired by a true literary mystery, New York Times bestselling author of the mesmerizing The Secret Book of Flora Lea returns with the sweeping story of a legendary book, a lost mother, and a daughter’s search for them both.
It all started with a literary mystery and a secret language.
For two decades, I have kept my ears and heart attuned to hidden stories. Yet, I wasn’t searching for a literary mystery when I stumbled upon the haunting tale of Barbara Newhall Follett—a prodigy, a trailblazer, and a woman who disappeared at the age of twenty-five without a trace. Sometimes, the best stories find us when we least expect them.
Born in 1914, Barbara’s life seemed destined for brilliance. By the age of eight, she had penned The House Without Windows, a fantastical novel about a girl who escapes to live in nature with fairies and nymphs. Four years later, the book was published by Knopf to widespread acclaim, with The New York Times hailing it as “a truly remarkable little book.” But Barbara wasn’t just a writer; she was an inventor of worlds. She created an entire language, Farksoola, and surrounded herself with imaginary friends like Mozart and Bach, even reserving them seats at the dinner table.
Behind the enchantment of her stories, Barbara’s life was a tempest. Her idyllic childhood unraveled when her beloved father abandoned the family. This betrayal marked the beginning of a restless and turbulent life. By twenty-six, Barbara had married an outdoorsman named Nick and was living in Boston. But her literary career had faltered, and her marriage was crumbling. One December night in 1939, after an argument about Nick’s infidelity, Barbara walked out of their apartment and vanished.
Today, most of Barbara’s work—aside from The House Without Windows, which was reissued with whimsical illustrations—languishes out of print. Her intricate language and lifetime of writings are preserved in six archival boxes at Columbia University. Yet, even within those delicate pages, the answers to her mysterious disappearance remain elusive.
Barbara’s story is more than a cold case; it is a meditation on the fragility of genius and the resilience of a young girl who turned to the imaginary for comfort. As a child, she taped a sign to her bedroom door that read: “Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight. Reason: The person in the room wishes to be left alone.”
Her vanishing remains unsolved, a mystery as haunting and beautiful as her stories. Barbara wrote archetypal myths steeped in themes of escape and rooted in the natural world. Her stories reflect her obsessions, her longings, and her brilliant mind, but they do not reveal what became of her. And I wanted answers, so I decided to solve the mystery in fiction with a character named Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, her daughter Clara Harrington, and her granddaughter, Wynnie.
When we don’t have answers, we often seek them in story, and this is how the writing of The Story She Left Behind began – with a cold case that has never been solved and a brilliant young writer reaching for something just beyond the horizon.