The Story of Opal was first published in 1920, when Opal was nearly twenty-three. Subtitled The Journal of An Understanding Heart, the book was celebrated as a work of wonder and imagination, if not genius. Purportedly written during her sixth and seventh years, it is a record of her trips through the woods around Cottage Grove, in western Oregon's Lane County. Opal befriended the animals, birds, flowers and trees, giving them fantastic names from classical mythology, and professed her love for all natural things. "I do like it, this house we do live in, being at the edge of the near woods," she writes in the opening pages. "So many little people do live in the near woods. I do have conversations with them." The story behind the diary, though, has for years overshadowed the book itself. How it was written -- with crayon on scraps of torn-up paper -- had skeptics looking closer. Nor did they believe the account of when it was written -- critics said she wrote it when she was twenty and tried to pass it off as a childhood work. And Opal's claim in the book that she was not Opal Whiteley, but actually an adopted French princess, made for more sensational copy than the book's tales of joy, hope and love. Within months, praise turned to disdain, and the remarkable young woman with long, black hair and large, round eyes faced in turn rejection, obscurity and finally death in a London insane asylum.