The Story She Left Behind

The Story She Left Behind is loosely based on the life and story of American author Barbara Newhall Follett. Specifically, Henry has based her character Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham on “the literary mystery” of Fordham and the “secret language” she invented (333). Many of the details that define Bronwyn’s character and storyline align with Fordham’s history.

Like Bronwyn, Fordham “was a child-prodigy author” (333). She showed early signs of an interest in and talent for reading and writing. She began to pen poems and stories at the age of five and soon set out to write her full-length novel. She completed her book The House Without Windows when she was eight years old. The novel tells “the tale of Eepersip, ‘a child who ran away from loneliness, to find companions in the woods—animal friends’ and stretched to over forty thousand words” (Collins, Paul. “Vanishing Act.” Lapham’s Quarterly). Her father, literary editor, critic, and lecturer, Wilson Follett, helped her publish the novel while he was working at Knopf; Fordham was 12 at the time.

In the years following, Fordham experienced mental health conditions brought about by her social alienation, her parents’ divorce, and marital conflicts. At 25 years old, she disappeared from her home after an argument with her husband, Nickerson Rogers. Rogers did little to recover Fordham, much to Fordham’s mother’s frustration. Her body was never found, although in 2019, the writer Daniel Mills publicly theorized that Fordham’s body was misidentified as another missing woman in 1948. This theory has never been formally or forensically proven.

In The Story She Left Behind, Henry uses Fordham as inspiration for her explorations of artistic passion, mother-daughter relationships, and the entanglement of the past and present. As she writes in her author’s note at the end of the source text, Henry has taken “liberties with dates and facts for the sake of the story” (334). In particular, she gives Bronwyn the happy ending that Fordham never received.