The Story She Left Behind

The Story She Left Behind 

By Patti Callahan Henry 

Atria Books, 2025 

Genre: Fiction 

Reviewed by Donna Estill 

Inspired by the real-life disappearance of child prodigy writer Barbara Newhall Follett at age 25, Patti Callahan Henry’s The Story She Left Behind is a mystery, a tale of seemingly random connections that draws characters and stories together. The book opens in 1927 with Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham slipping away into the night, both literally and figuratively.  Bronwyn is a wife and mother who is also a child prodigy, having published her first and only novel at age 11, and she is leaving behind a husband, Timothy Harrington, and a daughter, eight-year-old Clara. The moody darkness of open water, a boat, and silence set the tone for the first part of the novel.  

The narration is picked up by the daughter Clara Harrington, now a divorced single mother of an eight-year-old.  She teaches art at the local elementary school, lives with her father and fragile eight-year-old daughter Wynnie in the family home, and has just won a Caldecott award for her illustrations of a children’s book. Bronwyn, however, continues to haunt Clara and her father. Bronwyn’s only book left the protagonist suspended in a dark otherworld; she left a sequel, but it is in a language that Bronwyn developed, accessible only through a dictionary she took when she left. Clara is sure that if she finds her mother’s “dictionary” and can translate the sequel, she will somehow find her mother and answer her own questions: Who was Bronwyn? What made her leave? Is she alive or dead? 

As she grapples with those questions in the wake of a newspaper interview, she gets a phone call from a man who may have the answers. Charlie Jameson’s father has recently passed away. Among his father’s voluminous research and books, Charlie has come across a leather satchel with a note addressed to Clara, including instructions to deliver it to her in person, not via mail.  

A few details convince Clara that Charlie is telling the truth and that he has the dictionary. She decides, against the wishes of her gambling-addicted ex-husband Nat, to take her daughter Wynnie and travel to London. After an ocean voyage, they arrive in the middle of the Great London Smog, leaving Wynnie gasping as the toxic smog irritates her asthma.  Charlie and his family’s housekeeper, Moira, help Clara and Wynnie escape the city to Cumbria and the Lake District.  

The mystery deepens there through a series of coincidences? supernatural forces? that indicate a strong connection between Bronwyn, Clara, Wynnie, and Charlie Jameson’s family. Soon, they are all involved in trying to help Clara solve the mystery of her mother’s connection to Charlie’s father. 

As much as it is a mystery, The Story She Left Behind is an ode to the power, beauty, and potential of language. English falls short of expressing emotions, characters tell us throughout the book, from the author’s beginning note through the ending. To solve that dilemma, the real-life inspiration Barbara Newhall Follett created her own language, as do Henry’s Bronwyn and Beatrix Potter, the Peter Rabbit author who appears as a deceased character in the story. Even Wynnie, Bronwyn’s granddaughter, is adding her own words to the language by the end of the novel.  The effect of the focus on language creation and translation is the sense that language is more than expression; Callahan seems to imply that language creates us and either connects us or separates us. Without the right words to express a feeling, it is incomplete.  And without someone to translate the word, it exists in a dark realm, hidden from the world and disconnected from others.  

The book is also a love song to two locations. The Harrington’s home is “at the end of a rutted road in Bluffton, South Carolina, a small coastal village curled around an estuary, a moody body of water.” The shadows of oaks and Spanish moss highlight the mystery of the Harringtons’ lives. At the other end of the story is the Jamesons’ home in the Lake District in England, “a rugged edifice hidden in the bowl of the mountains and pasture.”  The strength and timelessness of Cumbria echoes Clara’s journey. Somehow, Clara is connected emotionally to both places, and she must find out why she has painted this location without ever having been there. 

The Story She Left Behind is, at its heart, about human connection.  From generation to generation, through the language that parents speak and share with their children; from lover to lover, the words that connect; from place to place, the words that describe. Characters are the creation of the connections that have been given to them and the ones they weave.   

A beautifully written, emotionally satisfying story; I couldn’t put this book down until I finished it. 

Donna Estill is the Dean of Humanities & Social Sciences at Calhoun Community College.  She is an avid reader and artist.