The Dennis Wheatley 'Museum' - Champions of Reincarnation: Dennis Wheatley & Joan Grant

DW promotes Joan's second book, 'Life As Carola'

'Life as Carola' (left), an interesting dedication (right),
and the typescript of DW's review (below)

The 'Guy' in the dedication is almost certainly
Guy McCaw, without whom 'Winged Pharaoh'
would never have been published

Click on the images to enlarge

For a transcription of DW's entire review, Click here

Joan's second 'Far Memory' book was 'Life as Carola', published in 1939.

While recalling her life as Sekeeta, Joan had come across snippets of another life, this one in medieval times. But while Sekeeta's life was on-the-whole happy (the last few years were sad), her incarnation as Carola in Perugia in the sixteenth century was almost unremittingly grim. She was born the illegitimate child of a minor noble and a seamstress, cast out of society and lived a largely joyless life; meeting various evil people along the way, including an abbess who had a mother and new born child immured while they were alive. Carola died when twenty seven without there being much lightening of the gloom.

The book does however contain, a chapter, Chapter 13, 'The Lotus', with perhaps the best and most evocative description of reincarnation that Joan Grant ever wrote, tucked in between chapters detailing medieval misery and cruelty in relentless detail.

The message of hope from reincarnation apart, wartime readers were perhaps uplifted by realising that even in the Blitz, their lives were 'a bag of laughs' compared with Carola's.

Joan had by this time left Leslie and met Charles Beatty (whom she identified as Petruchio, the hunchbacked jester who was kindly to Carola in the story), so this book was dedicated to him.

Just as he had done for 'Winged Pharaoh', DW reviewed 'Life As Carola' in Current Literature, and clearly he did not find it overly downbeat.

His review read in part :

'At this present time it is of immense importance because it carries
the message that Death is not to be feared. Death is a friend who
brings Release so that we once again become fully conscious of
our true and finer selves ... ... ... This is why every family, even if
they have to save their pennies, should give with their love copies
of LIFE AS CAROLA and its glorious predecessor, WINGED
PHARAOH, to their fighting men.'

For the full text of the review, click here

References : On Guy McCaw, 'Time Out Of Mind' pp 247-8
On Petruchio and Charles Beatty, Overton Fuller pp10-11.
Phil Baker p406

Provenance: Private collections (review of 'Life As Carola' ex Humphreys collection)