She was the daughter of James Hunter Neal and poet and folklorist Lois Diantha Mills (1889-1939).
Her mother later married musicologist and Vanderbilt University professor George Pullen Jackson.
Based on Barnes' own experience at a boarding school for girls, the novel detailed the sexual experimentation, including lesbianism, of Naomi Bradshaw and her fellow students.
[1] In 1946, Barnes published her final novel, Time Lay Asleep, about a large family in the southern United States.
In that book, Barnes experimented with chronological, psychological, and symbolic elements in a way that has been compared to the work of William Faulkner.