A born psychic who trained herself to remember past lives, Joan Grant did not set out to be a writer, yet turned out to be a born storyteller, able to grip and inspire her readers. Her conviction that ‘it is within each of us to be able to help others and to change their lives for the better’ was the motive for writing books, as it was for living.
Her method was unconventional. She would dictate random memories from her previous lives (the notebooks still survive), and then piece them together into a coherent whole, slowly understanding how one incident related to another. Her ‘far memory’ books were not, however, some sort of automatic writing, but the result of the usual authorial hard work: poetic in style, vivid in detail, with engaging protagonists (usually women) who used their wit, courage and spiritual wisdom to prevail against the forces of dishonesty and corruption. Set in far off times, they nevertheless resonate as teachings for our own time, as urgently as they did in the dark days of World War II when many were published.
Her books have been translated into 15 languages and for eighty odd years Winged Pharaoh has never been out of print.
Previous editions
Beginning in the 1980s, Ariel Press published nearly all of Joan Grant’s books in paperback and kept them in print for upwards of 20 years. It may still be possible to buy remaindered new copies of these.
Copies of the original hardback editions published by Arthur Barker, Methuen and Robert Hale in the UK and Harper in the US can still be found for example via Amazon or Abe Books, as can paperback copies.
Related reading
Now and Then – Reincarnation, Psychiatry and Daily Life (2007) by Denys Kelsey is published in the UK by Trencavel Press.