[4] Barbara was an imaginative and intelligent child: by age seven, she had begun to put to paper her own imaginary world, Farksolia, and to develop its language, Farksoo.

In 1923, when Follett was only eight years old, she began writing The Adventures of Eepersip, later titled The House Without Windows, as a birthday present for her mother using a small portable typewriter she had been given.

The story concerned a young girl, named Eepersip, who runs away from home and family to live happily in nature, complete with animal friends.

With the help and guidance of Follett's father, The House Without Windows was accepted and published in 1927 by Knopf to critical acclaim by The New York Times, the Saturday Review, and H. L.

[7] Follett's next book, The Voyage of the Norman D., recounted her June 1927 journey on a coastal lumber schooner from New Haven to Nova Scotia.

[3] She wrote several more manuscripts, including the novel Lost Island and Travels Without a Donkey, which described a walking and canoeing trip from northern Maine to the Massachusetts border.

Although initially happy, by 1937 Barbara had started expressing dissatisfaction concerning married life in her letters to close friends, and by 1938 these cracks had widened even further.

In a letter to Rogers, she wrote: "All of this silence on your part looks as if you had something to hide concerning Barbara's disappearance ... You cannot believe that I shall sit idle during my last few years and not make whatever effort I can to find out whether Bar is alive or dead, whether, perhaps, she is in some institution suffering from amnesia or nervous breakdown.

[12] Mills explained that the body was found on Pulsifer Hill in Holderness, New Hampshire, one-half mile (0.80 km) from a farmhouse where Follett and Rogers had a long-standing rental agreement.

The cause of death was determined to be suicide, as a bottle containing barbiturate residue was found at the scene—a substance Follett was known to have taken following her return to Boston in August, 1939.