Joan Grant

Joan Marshall Grant Kelsey (London, 12 April 1907 – 3 February 1989) was an English author of historical novels and reincarnationist.

Joan Marshall was born 12 April 1907, at London, England, daughter of John Frederick Marshall and Blanche Emily Hughes. Joan Grant's father was of dual US-British nationality – a real tennis player who won his place in the semi- finals of the World Championship for each country and thus needed to play against himself. He also carried out at his own expense valuable pioneering work on the Anopheles mosquito for which purpose he had installed a full research unit on Hayling Island. Joan Grant spent her early years on Hayling Island in Hampshire and as a young woman won the Hampshire Ladies Golf finals – having never before played golf!

Joan married Leslie Grant on 30 November 1927. She married Charles Beatty, 14 March 1940. Beatty was also a writer, first manager of the Montague Motor Museum in Beaulieu and one of the first announcers on Radio Luxembourg and transcribed some of Joan Grant's earlier books from a wire voice recorder. She married Denys Kelsey on 1 September 1960.

Her first and most famous novel was Winged Pharaoh (1937). Grant 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 countless reviews the world over. 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 that she believed herself to have lived. The book is still considered a cult classic by believers in the New Age religion. It was followed by other historical fantasies, or as Grant called them, "Far Memory books," or "previous life autobiographies". This book was initially accepted as a novel; Grant's first husband was a barrister and Egyptologist who spent many years prior to World War II working on excavations in Egypt, and as Joan accompanied him on some of these expeditions she was quite aware of many facets of Egyptian history. "Winged Pharaoh" was claimed by some to in fact be a re-incarnationist autobiography. Historians claimed that the calendar used in the book had never existed and also that there was no evidence whatsoever for the existence of an avenue of trees referred to in the book. After World War II a text was found Template:Where? who? which when translated proved to be the calendar referred to by Grant in the 1937 book.

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