'A date with Barbara': paracosms of the self in biographies of Barbara Newhall Follett

'A date with Barbara': paracosms of the self in biographies of Barbara Newhall Follett

In 1927, 13-year-old Barbara Newhall Follett published her first book, the critically acclaimed novel, The House Without Windows and Eepersip's Life There.

Twelve years later, on December 7, 1939, 25-year-old Barbara quarrelled with her husband and left her apartment in Boston with $30 in her pocket, and a notebook. She was never seen again.

The House Without Windows is set in a paracosm (Farksolia) she invented, and ends with the metamorphosis of the titular character into a 'fairy-a wood nymph … invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see'.

In Barbara's (auto)biography, The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius (1966), written by Harold Grier McCurdy 'in collaboration with Helen Follett' (Barbara's mother), the authors wonder: 'Can we be far wrong in substituting Barbara's name for Eepersip's in the closing scenes of [House Without Windows]?

In this paper, I grapple with the formal and ethical challenges of writing about Barbara Newhall Follett, and the ways her family and others have approached the problem of writing her unresolved life story: a child raised and educated in solitude, a celebrated 'natural' child author, a young woman whose disappearance remains unsolved. The paper will explore the ways in which adults write the stories of children's lives, as nostalgia and fable, as fairytale and paracosmic narrative, and the ways in which Barbara's biographers have, consciously and unconsciously, created biographical concordances, or paracosms of the self, in seeking to make meaning of her life's story.

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