by Laura Smith
In the summer, the Folletts rented a cabin on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire. Barbara and her father would canoe along the shoreline, where the land came out like fingers into the water. There were lighthouses and endless trails through oak and pine forests. White-tailed deer roamed the woods, as did porcupines, moose, black bears, red foxes, and muskrats. Wild loons yodeled and arrived in great masses to feed on the golden trout and perch that lived in the pristine lake, which drew from cold underwater springs rising from a bedrock aquifer.
Barbara fed minnows on the lake’s sandbars. She tried to count them, but with so many of them all flitting around each other it was as if they were one scintillating body. She put mussel shells in a box and hid them in a secret cave. She learned to dive and swim doggy paddle. “Open your eyes,” Wilson cajoled her as she swam. There was a whole world of creatures down there, and he didn’t want her to miss it. He built a wooden box with mesh wire nailed to the top for the salamanders she collected along the lake’s mossy banks. The creatures’ lethargic gait delighted her—the way they slowly lifted a limp back foot and placed it near the front foot before moving forward. She would let them walk on her hand, only to surprise them by placing another hand in front after they had completed the arduous journey across the first.
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Barbara’s mother took care of all the small details of daily life, but her father was the one who fascinated and delighted. He was her adventure companion. When she went hiking with him and his friend, they let her decorate their heads with flowers. She created charms and spells, and when she announced to her father that she had turned him into a kangaroo, he obligingly hopped around. When she tried to cast the spell on her mother, it didn’t work.
When she was seven, she wrote a play about fairies and goblins that was likely inspired by the works of George MacDonald, the Scottish fantasy writer, whose books she devoured. Simultaneously, she was creating compendiums of imaginary birds, fish, and fairies with precise descriptions of the creatures’ bodies, and habits. The Daylight Fuzzywing’s “upper side is mostly white, but there is a band of orange around the wings with a row of six silver spots set in the band like precious stones, six of them on the upper wing, and four on the lower one.” A friend of her parents drew pictures to match her descriptions of the imaginary butterflies.
She wrote stories about a planet called Farksolia, ruled by two children. The inhabitants lived in cities and left the wilderness untouched. She created the Farksolian census of hair color. The planet contained 40 Farksolians with black hair, 145 with auburn, and 500 blondes. She described the constellations that could be seen in the Farksolian sky and their complicated royal lineage.
She created an alphabet and language called Farksoo and wrote elaborate poems in Farksoo, all paeans to nature. “There are three tenses only: past present and future,” she wrote. “The past is formed by suffixing vo to the root and pronoun: aravo, arovo, arivo etc.” There were three ways to express the interrogative. Meaning changed depending on voice inflection. The sentence “Do you know whether or not you shall come” became “Laitro feer merlovai.”
Wilson ordered two card-catalogue drawers from Boston so that Barbara could arrange the English-to-Farksoo dictionary in one and the Farksoo-to-English dictionary in the other. Barbara hoped that her friends from Farksolia would come in a boat and take her with them back to their perfect blue planet. “And if I ever come back, which would be doubtful,” Barbara wrote, “I would never be contented with the Earth again.”
Even at ten, she was self-aware enough to know that each adventure made the ones that came before it seem ordinary; each path she cut through the woods made her crave the discovery of other paths. She was reading Robert F. Griggs’s The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, about the discovery of the Katmai volcano in Alaska, and was captivated by the idea of exploration. When a friend wrote to say he had discovered a pond, she wrote back, “And to think of discovering it! The thrill of discovering a thing which no one else has ever seen!” She believed that satisfaction could be found in a place—it was just a matter of getting there.
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Barbara’s world was full of people, but few of them were children. Writers, publishers, and academics came and went, staying for dinner or longer. Barbara charmed a classics professor from the University of Wisconsin and exchanged letters with a close friend of Walt Whitman’s. But her two greatest correspondents were Mr. Oberg, a Swedish émigré who ran an antique restoration shop in Providence, and Mr. St. John, a naturalist and dean of a theological seminary in New York. It was Mr. St. John who wrote to Barbara about discovering the pond, and she wrote back telling him everything she was reading, exploring, and thinking. She often referred to Mr. St. John as her “best friend” and “best traveling companion,” enumerating the many adventures they would have together at Lake Sunapee. Mr. Oberg and Mr. St. John showered Barbara with gifts—furniture, moth cocoons, clocks, and stuffed animals—and she wrote back exuberantly: “Mr. St. John, I am crazy about the cocoons you sent me, and I, in spite of the fact that you told me a lot about them, have quite a lot to ask you.” The decades between them didn’t seem to bother her. Barbara’s imaginary friends were adults as well: Beethoven, Wagner, and the Strausses. Once Wilson unknowingly nearly sat on one of her invisible friends at the breakfast table, but Barbara grabbed the chair, squealing, “Hey, that’s Wagner’s chair!”
The Folletts decided to homeschool her because they felt a girl of her precocious talents should not be in a traditional school. Helen explained in an essay in Good Housekeeping that ordinary schooling robs children of their uniqueness and gives them “a bored tolerance of the world.” The Folletts made sure that Barbara was never bored. In her essay, Helen repeatedly referred to Barbara’s schooling as “our adventure.” “There has been only excitement in the discovery that the world was her special nut to crack,” she wrote. “Asking questions, demanding answers, asking more questions for more answers became the formula in the house.” Wilson would later write that he and Helen let Barbara “run wild, form associations by accident, and be mainly taught by experience and necessity . . . Nothing has as yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed of it. She has been given plenty of time to know herself.”
It was a progressive time in education in the United States. The psychologist and educational reformer John Dewey wanted to abandon the tradition of rote memorization in favor of something more engaging. Much of what Helen and Wilson wrote about Barbara’s education, especially regarding what Wilson described as “fostering a child’s sense of natural order and beauty,” recalls Maria Montessori’s conception of “student-led learning.” Montessori schools had begun to spread rapidly in the United States a few years before Barbara was born, but Wilson and Helen didn’t see their method of education as following any established system. When Barbara was six, Wilson wrote that her education was “an experiment.” They saw themselves as the master craftsmen of the most enchanted childhood.
Barbara was not free to run around in the woods all day. Quite the contrary: she was receiving a far more rigorous education than most children her age. When she was ten, a typical morning’s lesson plan might include an hour on the piano, some violin, French verb conjugation, vocabulary practice, poetry memorization, and an oral exercise followed by arithmetic. “I am anxious to get through this commission business and get into interest with you—banking, etc.,” Helen wrote in her instructions for Barbara when she was nine. Writing letters to her various adult correspondents was often part of the lesson plan, as was reading everything from National Geographic to Keats’s poetry.
Stories about the wild consumed her—especially one. She was writing a novel about a little girl named Eepersip who ran away to the wilderness and vanished forever. Her pace was feverish: twelve hundred words an hour, four thousand to five thousand words a day. She could see it all so clearly; the lush dewy forest, the deer with their tai
ls alert, the way that a lily seemed to pause just before it bloomed, overwhelmed by what it would become. “I wanted to run away,” Barbara wrote later, “but, realizing the impossibility of it, I made someone else do it for me.”
Barbara put a long note on her bedroom door outlining the conditions for entry:
Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking . . . If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone.
She called her story The House Without Windows. In it, Eepersip is bored. One day, she wanders off, going deeper and deeper into the woods. She takes off her dress, replacing it with a dress of ferns. She weaves flowers into her hair and follows a new calendar, measured by years of wildness: “on the second day of her wildness”; “the first years of wildness . . .” It is a new life, “the wild life,” and Eepersip has no intention of returning home—ever.
Though there are nymphs and fairies in the woods, Barbara wanted the setting of her novel to seem like a real place. As she worked through drafts over the course of her tenth and eleventh years, she tried to keep the flora and fauna consistent with the latitude, altitude, and season. There were blue and gold irises and “lady-slippers” in spring, and bright red cordary berries in winter. She left footnotes in the text that seem more like a botanist’s log than anything from a child’s fairy tale: “The cordary berry grows during the winter and is at its best by New Year”; “[the juice] keeps the kernel moist.” She was drawing from her knowledge of New Hampshire, where she was born, Vermont and Maine, where she visited, and the woods near her house on Armory Street in New Haven. East Rock Park, with the Mill River running through it, was a short walk away, and just beyond that were the Quinnipiac River marshlands. She knew the woods in the book needed to be as vibrant as those places, perhaps suspecting that a fantasy’s potency depends on the possibility it could happen. What if?
As she was putting the finishing touches on The House Without Windows, she wrote of her yearning for a wilder life: “I want as long as possible in that green, fairylike, woodsy, animal-filled, watery, luxuriant, butterfly-painted, moth-dotted, dragonfly-blotched, bird-filled, salamandrous, mossy, ferny, sunshiny, moonshiny, long-dayful, short-nightful land, on that fishy, froggy, tadpoly, shelly, lizard-filled lake—[oh,] no end of the lovely things to say about that place, and I am mad to get there.” Barbara is the girl inside the house, rattling at her cage, demanding to be set free. Go outside, she is saying. Embrace the world in all its frightening, joyful, sun-filled complexity.
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The House Without Windows is a somewhat disturbing read. For one thing, Eepersip doesn’t seem to care about her parents at all. She is never homesick, and the whole first third of the book is concerned with Mr. and Mrs. Eigleen’s attempts to catch her, to grab an ankle or a shoulder, the end of her dress, but she is “light as a feather and graceful as a fern,” and each time, she wriggles free.
Her parents suffer terribly. Mrs. Eigleen develops a nervous disorder: “She spent the spring in continual weeping and hysterics. Towards the summer she began to feel seriously ill.” After Mr. Eigleen chases Eepersip up a tree, Barbara writes, “At last, in despair, he descended; and the people went away, leaving Eepersip in peace. . . . ‘My, that was a dreary adventure!’ she said sleepily, as she crawled off to find a place to sleep.”
The heartsick parents are a nuisance. Eepersip sees their suffering but doesn’t care. She makes several animal friends but abandons them quickly when a better adventure arises. She has no regrets. She misses no one. At another point, she discovers she has a little sister and returns home to peer into her bedroom window. She is enamored with the little girl and convinces her to run away and live the wild life with her. But unlike Eepersip, the little sister, Fleuriss, gets homesick. Eepersip is forced to bring her back.
As the two sisters say good-bye forever, Fleuriss asks, “Why don’t you come home?—you’ve been away so long—and Mother cries for you still. Please come.” Eepersip responds, “Oh, Fleuriss, I couldn’t. If I were to go back home now, I should just die—even with you.” After they part, “Eepersip stood on her tiptoes an instant: then, quick as a flash, she whirled about and bounded off, free—relieved of a gigantic burden.”
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In July of 1923, when Barbara was ten, Helen gave birth to another daughter, Sabra Wyman Follett, who was likely the inspiration for Fleuriss. Before the birth, Barbara’s parents sent her to spend the summer in Sunapee with family friends, while they remained in New Haven. Barbara wrote letters to them every day, eagerly awaiting news of her sister’s arrival. When Sabra was born, Barbara was delighted, announcing the birth to her friends in her letters: “Best of all I now have a little BABY SISTER.” When Barbara finally came home in October, she was enchanted by Sabra, calling her “my little baby,” and adding, “She is a little apple-blossom.” Barbara watched Sabra as she gurgled and cooed, imagining that she desperately wanted to speak. As Sabra got older, Barbara wrote long exuberant descriptions of her attempts to crawl, sit up, and roll over. On pleasant days, Barbara wrote that they set the baby in the backyard for hours on end to enjoy the “fresh, woodsy air,” noting how much her eyes shone afterwards.
The next summer, the Folletts brought Sabra to Sunapee, and Barbara reported that her sister loved the place as much as she did. When the family returned to New Haven, Barbara remarked, “I feel sure she misses being turned loose in the sand.” When Sabra was two, the sisters began venturing into the woods together to collect pussy willows and moss. Barbara was nearly delirious with excitement to have an adventure companion. “She is such a delicious darling; such a rogue; so mischievous; so funny; so pretty; and so little.” What Barbara did, Sabra mimicked. When Barbara touched moss, Sabra touched it. As Barbara typed letters to Mr. Oberg in her study, Sabra sat nearby perched on the couch watching her. She told Barbara she wanted to write letters to “Missha Oberg” too. Barbara wrote, “If I should try to describe her to you, it would be wasted energy, for she is too beautiful to be described.” Yet she was unable to resist trying. She wrote about Sabra in almost every letter during those first few years of her life. In addition to Barbara’s many ongoing writing projects, she was working on “an account of Sabra.” She dedicated The House Without Windows to her.
In The House Without Windows, the scenes with the little sister are the only ones that hint at ambivalence, the only moments when the reader sees Eepersip loving someone. But still she leaves. In the end, Eepersip gets what she wants: she vanishes into thin air. As she stands deep in the forest, butterflies surround her and land on her wrists:
And then—she rose into the air, and, hovering an instant over a great laurel-bush, vanished. She was a fairy—a wood-nymph. She would be invisible for ever 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.
When Barbara finished the first draft of her novel, she handed it to her father. He reported studying the pages with the same editorial seriousness he would give to the books he was publishing. Though he didn’t show it right away, he was delighted. “So much I found in it of the mighty swimmer, the enjoyable young comrade of trail and river, always ready to swing a paddle tirelessly or carry ungrumbling a full fair share of pack,” he wrote. Barbara planned to give the novel to her mother. Would she like it? Yes, Wilson said. She certainly would. He had an idea. What if they tried to publish it? Barbara said she would like that very much.
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The editing process was grueling. Barbara typed out passages and then crossed out words, phrases, and entire paragraphs with pencil. Penciled sentences hovered above scratched-out printed lines, and she scratched out even those and wrote them again. She wrote on the back when the page was too full. She cut pages in half with scis
sors and kept them piled up. She retyped passages and glued them over the passages she didn’t like. Every page was covered in marks. No word went unscrutinized.
Since Wilson was working at Knopf, when Barbara was finished he brought the novel to them. She waited anxiously for the response, checking the mail every day. One day a letter arrived. It was blue, with Knopf’s bounding borzoi logo stamped on the back. Her hands trembled as she held it. “I simply threw myself down on the floor and screamed, either with fear for what it might contain, with joy for getting it at last. . . . There is a feeling that, when it finally comes, it must be impossible—a dream—an optical illusion—a cross between those three things.” Barbara tore open the letter and read. She let out a shriek of delight. “It is Eepersip, The House Without Windows, my story, my story in New York, with the Knopfs, to be published!! . . . PUBLISHED!!!!!!!”
The House Without Windows was published in 1926, when Barbara was twelve. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was published that same year. A year before, the New Yorker ran its first issue and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had come out. Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and William Faulkner were publishing in that period as well. It’s a wonder that a twelve-year-old’s book was noticed at all, but The House Without Windows sold out before a single book was on the store shelves, and a second printing had to be ordered. The wunderkind darling of the Follett household became the wunderkind darling of the New York literary scene. H. L. Mencken, the tastemaking literary critic who founded the influential literary magazine American Mercury, praised the book. Blanche Knopf, the publisher responsible for the U.S. publication of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, sent Barbara a letter of congratulations. “Barbara is a genius,” read the Knickerbocker Press Magazine. The Daily Herald called the book “a miracle.”