Lost Island: plus three stories and an afterword

Lost Island was Barbara Follett’s third and last novel. It tells the story of Jane Carey, a young woman from Maine whose character and philosophy bear a striking similarity to her creator’s.

A lover of woods and mountains, Jane finds herself working in a dusty New York office during the early years of the Great Depression. Her job is dull, her friends are in trouble, and she yearns for adventure. She finds it on a schooner anchored in the harbor, which soon whisks her away to… where? Jane doesn’t know nor care.

Jane and second mate Davidson fall in love; and when the ship is wrecked during a mighty storm, they find paradise on an uncharted island in the South Pacific. Years pass, until the modern world resurfaces with its teeth bared, forcing the couple to deal with their new, heartbreaking reality.

Barbara’s earlier novels—The House Without Windows and The Voyage of the Norman D.—were published by Alfred A. Knopf when she was twelve and thirteen. The future of her literary career looked bright, but after her father deserted his family in 1928, Barbara’s world fell apart. A fearless girl, she managed her grief by cutting a new path—one full of adventure, wisdom, and love.

Lost Island mirrors the lives of its author and Edward Anderson, a sailor she met at sea in 1929. Five years after finishing it, on December 7, 1939, Barbara walked out of her home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and was not heard from again. She was twenty-five.

This expanded edition includes three other stories by Barbara—Rocks, Travels Without a Donkey, and Walking the Mallorcan Coast—and an afterword by her half-nephew, Stefan Cooke, whose Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters was published by Farksolia in 2015.