The House Without Windows - Barbara Newhall Follett

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Résumé :
The House Without Windows is an imaginative child's name for the world of untouched nature - because that world is itself nothing but one clear window upon beauty, which is a child's reality. The romantic story, printed exactly as written by a nine-year-old girl, is a clear and delicate record of discontent with ordinary pedestrian reality - with mere human parents and what they can provide. In meadows and woodland, by the sea, on the icy crags of mountains, the child - heroine, a runaway seeker, learns to understand the whispered language of nature. The story has something to say to children and perhaps even more to all who are interested in children. The volume contains an adequate explanatory note by the author's father.

Biographie:
Born in 1914 into a literary family, Barbara Newhall Follett published her first novel with Alfred A. Knopf--THE HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS--when she was twelve. It was widely praised throughout the United States and Great Britain. Eleanor Farjeon, who composed the hymn Morning Has Broken, wrote: These pages simply quiver with the beauty, happiness, and vigour of forests, seas, and mountains.... I can safely promise joy to any reader of it. Perfection. In 1927 Barbara convinced her parents to let her sail on an old trading schooner from her home in New Haven, Connecticut, to Nova Scotia; and the following year Knopf published THE VOYAGE OF THE NORMAN D.--her remarkable description of the voyage. Barbara's literary career looked bright, but shortly before publication her father deserted his family for a younger woman. Barbara was devastated, but convinced her mother that their best recourse was to go to sea with their typewriters. After ten months at sea Barbara met and fell in love with a sailor, Edward Anderson. After moving to New York during the early months of the Great Depression, Barbara began writing her third and last book--LOST ISLAND--which mirrors her own life and that of her wandering sailor's. Soon, however, she would meet a new beau, Nickerson Rogers. Both devotees of woods and mountains, the couple spent the summer of 1932 walking the Appalachian Trail from Katahdin to the Massachusetts border. After a year exploring Europe they married in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1934. Five years later, with the marriage failing, Barbara walked out of her home and was not heard from again. She was twenty-five.