Where Did She Go?

I can’t remember how I found this book.  I think I was searching for one thing and came upon this remarkable story:  Indeed, I may have come upon it looking for just who it was who’d written a book, had it destroyed in a fire and then rewrote it.  How many such stories are there out there?  I was searching for and ultimately found “This History of the French Revolution” by Thomas Carlyle.  This is certainly the most famous example and the one I’d seen before. 

But it only now upon reflection that I realize it must have been how I also found the book I read today.  “The House Without Windows” by Barbara Newhall Follett was a story too good not to act upon, as I recall.  Follett, a nine-year-old girl, wrote a remarkable piece of fiction as a present to her mother, only to have it destroyed in a fire.  Then, she took the next few years to rewrite the book from scratch, sharpening and enhancing a book that would ultimately be published when she was twelve.  The story for mom, was of a girl who leaves home and only returns to take her sister away with her, though she ultimately helps to return her sibling and venture out again, on her own. 

The story was well received and she became a notable young author.  She wrote more books.  But later, when her parents split, and she and her mom hit hard times during the depression, she wound up having to type copy for a living, dull, deadened she grew depressed and then, later, stuck in a dead-end marriage she one day up and disappeared, eerily akin to what happened to Eepersip, the heroine of her story. 

Where did she go?  Why did she decide to disappear?  Did a terrible fate and early death await her?  Did she assume a different identity and live to a ripe old age, without the world ever knowing.  Certainly, if anonymity were what she desired and anonymity was what she secured, I can only laud her remarkable life-as-art rendering, leveraging her characters escape to facilitate her own.  If something less fortunate befell our young author, it would sadden me to learn.  She was a precocious, home-schooled young mind that didn’t bother with boundaries and probably would never have written what she did if she was reciting the pledge of allegiance and being bullied in a classroom. 

I’ve been thinking of many people, young and old I’d like to send this to for Christmas.

Tuesday, 11/27/18