Joan Marshall's father, a wealthy man, was of dual US-British nationality—a prizewinning tennis player who at one point won his place in the semi-finals of the World Championship for each country, and thus needed to play against himself.
A serious amateur entomologist, 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.
[4] Though raised in genteel circumstances, Joan considered herself plucky and resourceful enough in her adult years to admirably adapt and live through some harsh periods of deprivation and patches of genuine calamity in Iraq.
Leslie Grant had studied for a career in law, but became excited by the opportunity to join an archaeological dig as a photographer at Tel Asmar in Iraq.
Joan joined him there, later remembering temperature extremes and violent dust storms under remote and starkly primitive conditions.
The New York Times hailed it as "A book of fine idealism, deep compassion and a spiritual quality pure and bright as flame"[citation needed], a sentiment echoed in reviews published elsewhere in the world.
[citation needed] 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.
Supposedly, after World War II a text was found [citation needed] which, when translated, proved to be the calendar referred to by Grant in the 1937 book.
[7] Grant believed she had been reincarnated at least forty times and that her far memory of past lives provided her the base material for her historical novels.
The book contains poetry, essays and a series of lectures she gave at Edgar Cayce's Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach.
A description of their inept and cranky attempts to treat the writer Heathcote Williams appears in the memoir Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour.