Casey was told her mother was an Irish Traveller, Annie Mahoney, but the identity of her biological father was shrouded in mystery, though he was rumoured to have been an English Romany.

[2][3][4][5][6] In the 1980s, Casey found a birth certificate that stated that she was born Lorna at Elm Drive, Teddington to mother Bertha Louise Newman, with no recorded father.

A fluent Romani speaker, Barlow introduced her to the world of the circus (which overwintered on his farm), steeplechasers, horse fairs, including those in Ireland, and Gypsy vans.

[3][2][4][5][6] A sudden decision by Fisher to sell Place Farm at Mappowder and live on an ex-fishing boat, resulted in the purchase of a top rigged schooner, The Star (aka The Looe).

Based in Cornwall, Juanita, an accomplished equestrian artist, began selling her work through Newlyn art galleries as well as in London.

Juanita appears in the 1961 Mai Zetterling film Lords of Little Egypt[9] made about the Gypsy festival of Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer in the Camargue in which she acted as interpreter.

Leaving Berlin and the New Forest they married in Cornwall in 1963 following her divorce - their witnesses were the Scottish poet W S Graham and his wife Nessie who lived in Mevagissey.

By now her poetry and short stories were being published, significantly by Liam Miller's The Dolmen Press, while she was working in the pottery decorating pots and plates.

[3][4][5][6] In 1974 she returned to the UK where she joined Roberts' Circus as Horse Master but succumbed to a more settled lifestyle when she made her home in Okehampton, Devon, with her daughter Sheba, where she continued to write.

[3][4][5][6] Casey returned to prominence in the summer of 2022 when Tramp Press reissued her 1971 cult classic, The Horse of Selene, in an edition with an Afterword by Mary M. Burke.