Joan Grant

Life

Joan Marshall was born 12 April 1907 in London, daughter of John Frederick Marshall and Blanche Emily Hughes. Her father, a wealthy man of dual US-British nationality, was a prizewinning tennis player who once won his place in the semi-finals of the World Championship for each country, thus needing to play against himself. He was also a serious amateur entomologist who carried out pioneering work on the Anopheles mosquito at his own expense, installing a full research unit on Hayling Island.

Joan spent her early years on Hayling Island in Hampshire, remembering herself as a lively, determined girl. She trained in ballet until an injury ended that pursuit, learned tennis, and as a young woman won the Hampshire Ladies Golf finals, claiming she had never before played golf. She also described herself as an excellent, risk-taking horsewoman. Joan said she learned aspects of science by assisting her father with his entomological research.

H. G. Wells, a friend of her father, was an admirer and sometime mentor. Joan described her mother as having had second-sight visions, and Joan herself said she experienced parapsychological phenomena from young girlhood, a sensitivity her friends often called eerie. Despite being raised in genteel circumstances, she adapted to periods of material deprivation and significant disruption during her years in Iraq. She married Leslie Grant on 30 November 1927.

Leslie had studied law but became excited by the opportunity to join an archaeological dig as a photographer at Tel Asmar in Iraq. Joan joined him, later remembering temperature extremes and violent dust storms under remote and starkly primitive conditions. During their return journey to England, they spent 25 days in Egypt. Joan later regretted that on this, her only visit to Egypt, she had no idea she had lived there in previous incarnations—this knowledge came to her only a few years later.

She married Charles Beatty on 14 March 1940, retaining the name "Joan Grant" as her nom de plume. Beatty was a writer, first manager of the Montague Motor Museum in Beaulieu, and one of the first announcers on Radio Luxembourg. He transcribed some of Joan Grant's earlier books from a wire voice recorder. She married Denys Kelsey on 1 September 1960.

Kelsey had been a practising psychiatrist who came to believe in a human soul and used hypnosis with patients. Joan apparently convinced him to believe in reincarnation and her psychic abilities, and he would sometimes ask her to use her paranormal gifts to help analyze especially challenging psychological and psychosomatic clients.

Novels

Joan Grant's first and most famous novel was Winged Pharaoh (1937). She shot to unexpected fame upon publication. The New York Times hailed it as "A book of fine idealism, deep compassion and a spiritual quality pure and bright as flame," a sentiment echoed in reviews elsewhere. What her readers did not officially know for almost another twenty years was that Joan claimed to have recalled the events in Winged Pharaoh while in a hypnotic or trance-like state, dictating piecemeal the lifetime she believed herself to have lived.

The book is still considered a cult classic in New Age literature. It was followed by other historical fantasies, or as Grant called them, "Far Memory books" or "previous life autobiographies." Winged Pharaoh was initially accepted as a novel. Grant was consciously aware of many details of Egyptian history, having accompanied her first husband on his Egyptian expeditions. Occultists embraced it as an autobiography of a previous existence.

Historians claimed that the calendar used in the book had never existed and that there was no evidence for an "avenue of trees" referred to in the book. Supposedly, after World War II a text was found which, when translated, proved to be the calendar Grant had used in the 1937 book. Grant's later novel, Lord of the Horizon (1943), was set in Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat I.

Reincarnationism

Joan Grant believed she had been reincarnated at least forty times and that her far memory of past lives provided the base material for her historical novels. She strove to disabuse herself and her readers of preconceptions, eschewing what she called 'group-think'. She was not interested in blind faith and blind belief, but in what could be perceived as true by the five senses. She claimed to have an unusual gift of "far memory"—the ability to remember previous lives—and something she referred to as "sensory awareness."

She said she experienced many realities not available to most people. A collection of previously unknown writings by Grant was published as Speaking from the Heart: Ethics, Reincarnation & What it Means to Be Human in 2007 by Overlook Press in the US and Duckworth Press in the UK. It was edited by her granddaughter Nicola Bennett, with anthologist Jane Lahr and Joan's closest friend Sophia Rosoff. The book contains poetry, essays, and a series of lectures she gave at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach.

She had a reputation for talking and writing with clear certainty about her belief in other realities, past lives, and death. She said that for her, the veil between the "worlds" simply did not exist. With her third husband, Denys Kelsey, she wrote Many Lifetimes (1968), in which she explained how she supposedly remembered her own and others' past lives. A description of their inept and cranky attempts to treat writer Heathcote Williams appears in the memoir Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour.

She also wrote several children's books containing stories she claimed she was told in past lives. Some of her books were published under the names Joan M. Grant and Joan Marshall Grant. Her books have been translated and published in many languages.