The House Without Windows · Chapter
Historical Note explained
Barbara Newhall Follett's father, Wilson Follett, provides a detailed account of the creation and revision of the story of Eepersip.
What happens
Barbara Newhall Follett's father, Wilson Follett, provides a detailed account of the creation and revision of the story of Eepersip. He explains how the nine-year-old Barbara wrote the original draft, lost it in a fire, and painstakingly reconstructed it from memory. The note describes the maturation of the author between ages nine and twelve, the minimal editorial help provided, and the value of the work as a rare expression of a child's pure, unmediated love of nature.
Themes in this chapter
Childhood Innocence and Imagination
The entire historical note frames the story as a pure expression of a child's imagination, capturing a phase of life where nature is paramount and civilization nearly irrelevant.
The Beauty and Power of Nature
Wilson Follett emphasizes that the story is less about pursuit and escape and more about 'sheer revelling in natural beauty,' reflecting the author's deep connection to the natural world.
Transformation and Self-Discovery
The note describes the author's own transformation from a nine-year-old to a twelve-year-old, and how the revision process itself was a journey of rediscovery and maturation.
Characters to notice
- Barbara Newhall Follett
The author, who wrote the story at age nine and revised it at age twelve. Her father describes her precocious articulacy, her love of nature, and the circumstances that allowed her to express her childhood imagination.
- Eepersip
The protagonist of the story, described by Wilson Follett as an embodiment of a healthy nine-year-old's consciousness—a figure who lives in nearly every child's mind but rarely finds expression in books.
- Fleuriss
Eepersip's younger sister, whose episode was expanded in revision because Barbara's own younger sister had become a reality by that time, allowing for adoring daily observation.
Key passages
“the impulses crystallized in this story mostly fade into the light of common day a year or two before the dawn of that amount of mechanical articulacy which is necessary for a tangible expression of them; and they are therefore almost never expressed.”
The feelings that inspired this story usually disappear before a child gains the writing skills needed to capture them, so such expressions are extremely rare.
Wilson Follett explains why Eepersip's story is unique: it captures a fleeting childhood perspective that is almost never recorded.
“Barbara, in short, designed this curious narrative at the last moment when to do so would have been at all open to her. By no human possibility could it have been in her head at eleven if she had not had it down on paper at nine.”
Barbara wrote the story at the very end of the childhood phase that inspired it; if she hadn't written it down at nine, she could never have recalled it at eleven.
This underscores the ephemeral nature of the imaginative worldview that produced the tale.