Barbara Newhall Follett – a talent lost

The oddly macabre tale of Barbara Newhall Follett has surfaced again with the reprint of her successful novel, House Without Windows, published when she was 12 years old in 1927, which propelled her to prominence as a child prodigy. Her second novel at 14 also received critical acclaim though in the same year her life fell to bits when her beloved father abandoned the family for a younger lover. She married at 19 and became depressed because of her husband’s infidelity and walked out, so the story goes, when she was 25 and was never heard from again. It’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder.

Born 4 March 1914 in Hanover, New Hampshire, she was creative and sensitive with Sun Venus and Mercury in Pisces, with her Sun Venus square Saturn in Gemini – so she would be prone to depression; though her Sun Venus were also trine Mars in Cancer giving her courage. Her Mercury in Pisces was in a good-for-fiction trine to Neptune in Cancer. Her Moon was in Gemini as was her Pluto; and she had an adventurous Jupiter Uranus in Aquarius. So a Water Air chart which often finds it tricky to find a balance between head and heart, and can be unstable. Not only did she have Saturn pulling down her self-esteem, she also had Mars conjunct Pluto which can lead to intense frustration and deeply buried anger which can be destructive.

When she disappeared her Solar Arc Saturn had moved to conjunct her Mars – which can be accident-prone but would also aggravate the Mars Pluto, bringing a sense of calamity; tr Pluto was within a degree of a conjunction to her Solar Arc Mars, again completely road-blocked; and her Solar Arc Pluto was conjunct her Neptune with tr Saturn in square to both which would be confusing to the nth degree. Whatever actually happened she would be on the edge of a breakdown with those influences running.