In 1943 Nickerson Rogers filed a Libel for Divorce on the grounds that Barbara, “wholly regardless of her marital duties and obligations,” had been absent for more than three years. His request was granted in 1944. He later remarried.
Barbara’s mother, Helen Follett, renewed the search for Barbara in 1952. She requested that the police reopen the case, expressing considerable frustration at Rogers’ unwillingness to provide a summary of his attempts to locate Barbara. She also wrote numerous persons who might have knowledge about Barbara’s movements. But the police declined to reopen the search, and her efforts failed to uncover any information or evidence about Barbara.
On what would have been Barbara’s 46th birthday, Helen wrote a letter introducing herself to Harold McCurdy, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studied childhood genius. They collaborated on the 1966 publication Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius, which analyzed Barbara’s writings and some of the events that shaped her life. Unfortunately, Helen and her collaborator suppressed some crucial aspects of Barbara’s story, and the book offers a somewhat sanitized and idealized portrait of a “child genius writer.”
Helen Follett authored five travelogue books and, later in life, became active in the civil rights movement. She died in 1970 at the age of 86. Wilson Follett preceded her in death; he was 76 when he died in 1963. His best-known work, Modern American Usage, was published posthumously. Barbara’s younger sister, Sabra, married Edward Meservey, the son of family friends Anne and Oxford. She raised three sons, was the first woman admitted for graduate study at Princeton in 1961 and had a successful career as a professor of history. She died in 1994.
To this day, Barbara’s disappearance remains a mystery. But the trail may not have gone completely cold.
For years, Vermont writer Daniel Mills painstakingly researched missing person reports and death records in hopes of uncovering some clue about Barbara’s fate. He has reported (in an article published April 5, 2019, in the Los Angeles Review of Books) on the case of remains found in rural New Hampshire formerly believed to be those of a woman who went missing in 1936. But there were several discrepancies between the findings and known facts about this woman. For instance, horn-rimmed spectacles were found nearby, and this woman didn’t wear glasses. Her family said that on the night she went missing she did not take her pocketbook with her, but a pocketbook was found at the scene, and the shoe size didn’t fit. But the evidence that fails to conform to particulars about this woman happens to fit Barbara. She did wear horn-rimmed glasses, and the shoe size is the same as hers. A medicine bottle with traces of barbiturate was found by the skeleton. Unfortunately, the remains of this skeleton are nowhere to be found so there can be no definitive testing (via DNA) of these remains.
After studying Barbara’s life and writings, I believe Barbara probably committed suicide. And, as Daniel Mills has written in his article, the area in which this skeleton was found had “great personal significance” to Barbara: She and Nick had camped in the area on several occasions. So, I have chosen to end this fictional account of Barbara’s life in accordance with my speculation and Daniel Mills’ research. Barbara likely died as she lived—shrouded in tragedy and enigma.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND RESOURCES
This novel is based on the lives of Barbara Newhall Follett and her parents, Helen and Wilson Follett. Although this is a work of fiction, I’ve tried to remain true to the events shaping Barbara’s life. Of course, the choice and rendering of content reflects my own intuitions about and interpretations of these peoples’ personalities and actions.
Barbara was a superb writer from a very young age, and I wanted to convey this in the novel. So I’ve sprinkled the narrative with words and short phrases from her works and letters. In instances in which passages from Barbara’s writings are quoted at any length, attribution is noted in the text, including the following:
Excerpts from The House without Windows (pp. 152-3) in the chapters “New Haven, March 1923” and “New Haven, August 1926.”
An excerpt from The Voyage of the Norman D (pp. 70-73) in the chapter “New Haven, April 1928.”
I would like to thank some of the many people who assisted and supported me on this project: Stefan Cooke, Barbara’s grandnephew, who keeps Barbara’s memory alive at his Farksolia.org website; Paul Collins, author of the 2011 Lapham’s Quarterly article that sparked my interest in Barbara; Allison Botelho, Reference Librarian, New Haven Free Public Library; Deborah and Cory Zita, my trusty research assistants; Carol Ivory, Danee Hazama, and Denise and Robert Koenig for information about matters Polynesian; Laurie Alberts and Diane Marshall for their inspiring guidance; early readers Mary and Del Fehrs; and Jean Shirkoff, a most excellent analyst of family dynamics. I’m grateful to Helen Follett for her foresight in donating correspondence, published and unpublished documents, and miscellaneous materials about Barbara’s life to Columbia University, thus ensuring the survival of these traces of Barbara’s life.
KEY RESOURCES
Astral Aviary. “The Barbara Newhall Follett Archive.” Retrieved June 12, 2012, from http://www.dreamshore.net/bluejay/barbara.html.
Collins, Paul. “Vanishing Act,” Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter, 2011.
Cooke, Stefan. “About Barbara Follett.” Farksolia: Barbara Newhall Follett’s Home on the Web. Retrieved February 6, 2012, from http://www.farksolia.org/about-barbara-follett/.
Dodd, Lee Wilson. “The House Without Windows.” The Saturday Review of Literature, February 27, 1927.
Follett, Barbara. “Barbados.” Helen Thomas Follett Papers, 1919-1969, Box 1. University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Follett, Barbara. The House Without Windows. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927.
Follett, Barbara. “In Defense of Butterflies,” The Horn Book Magazine, February, 1933.
Follett, Barbara. c. 1932-34. Lost Island, unpublished novel.
Follett, Barbara Newhall. Papers, 1919-1952, Boxes 1, 2, 5, 6 & 7. University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Follett, Barbara. c. 1934. “Mothballs in the Moon,” unpublished story.
Follett, Barbara. c. 1932. “Travels Without a Donkey,” unpublished story.
Follett, Barbara. The Voyage of the Norman D. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.
Follett, Helen. “Education Via the Typewriter,” Parent’s Magazine, September, 1932.
Follett, Helen. c. 1934. “Kitchen Journal,” unpublished essay. Follett, Helen Thomas. Papers, 1919-1969, Box 7. University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Follett, Helen. Magic Portholes. New York: Macmillan, 1932.
Follett, Helen Thomas. Papers, 1919-1969, Boxes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 7. University Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.
Follett, Helen. Stars To Steer By. New York: Macmillan, 1934.
Follett, Helen. Third-Class Ticket to Heaven: A Black Forest Adventure. Chicago: John C. Winston Company, 1938.
Follett, Helen, & Follett, Wilson. “Contemporary Novelists: William Dean Howells,” The Atlantic Magazine, March, 1917.
Follett, Helen, & Follett, Wilson. Some Modern Novelists: Appreciations and Estimates. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1918.
Follett, Wilson. The Modern Novel, A Study of the Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917.
Follett, Wilson. “Schooling Without the School.” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Volume CXXXIX, No. 833-89, 1919.
Follett, Wilson (as Anonymous). “To a Daughter, One Year Lost,” The Atlantic, May, 1941.
McCurdy, Harold G., in collaboration with Helen Follett. Barbara: The Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966.
Mills, Daniel. “A Place of Vanishing: Barbara Newhall Follett and the Woman in the Woods. Los Angeles Review of Book
s, April 5, 2019.
Moore, Anne Carroll. “Eepersip’s Escape,” New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1927.
Moore, Anne Carroll. “When Children Become Authors,” New York Herald Tribune, March 27, 1927.
Parry, Roger. Au-delà du Mythe Tahitien. Pirae, Tahiti, French Polynesia: Au Vent Des Iles, 1932.
Stuart, Henry Longan. “A Mirror of the Child Mind,” The New York Times, February 6, 1927.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maryka Biaggio, Ph.D., is a psychology professor turned novelist who specializes in historical fiction based on real people. She enjoys the challenge of starting with actual historical figures and dramatizing their lives—figuring out what motivated them to behave as they did, studying how the cultural and historical context may have influenced them, and recreating some sense of their emotional world through dialogue and action. Daisy Goodwin has described her novel Parlor Games as “a wildly entertaining and constantly surprising ride.” Eden Waits was awarded an Upper Peninsula of Michigan Notable Books award and an Editor’s Choice selection by the Historical Novel Society. Her fiction has won Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony, and La Belle Lettre awards. She’s an avid opera fan and enjoys gardening, art films, and, of course, great fiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon, that edgy green gem of the Pacific Northwest. You can visit her web page and sign up for her newsletter at
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an imprint of Sunbury Press, Inc.
Mechanicsburg, PA USA
NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 by Maryka Biaggio.
Cover Copyright © 2021 by Sunbury Press, Inc.
Sunbury Press supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Sunbury Press to continue to publish books for every reader. For information contact Sunbury Press, Inc., Subsidiary Rights Dept., PO Box 548, Boiling Springs, PA 17007 USA or [email protected].
FIRST MILFORD HOUSE PRESS EDITION: May 2021
Set in Bookman Old Style |Interior design by Chris Fenwick | Cover Art by Carla Oberst | Edited by Chris Fenwick.
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Biaggio, Maryka, author.
Title: The Point of Vanishing / Maryka Biaggio.
Description: Revised trade paperback edition. | Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania : Milford House Press, 2021.
Summary: Reimagining Barbara Follett’s enigmatic life. By age fourteen, Barbara had published two highly lauded books. But after her father deserted the family, her life careened off course. When her husband threatened divorce, she broke down and vanished from her Boston home. To this day, Barbara’s disappearance remains a mystery.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-62006-622-5 (softcover).
Subjects: BISAC: FICTION / Historical General | FICTION Family Life General | FICTION Psychological
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