Return to Elysium

Elysium, according to its author, was technically her most difficult undertaking. It is the story of Lucina, the young ward of a Greek philosopher, surrounded by an exclusively masculine society, yet too clear-sighted to accept her rigid education. Later in life, as founder of a mystic cult in the young and primitive city of Rome, she discovers an existence that transcends death. Surrounded not by a masculine society, but by an equally exacting family which questioned her continually, Joan Grant fought to safeguard her past experiences and to relate the predicament of a priestess beset by "scientists" who want to know the how and why about everything and who, in their zeal to pick apart the mechanism and examine it, stop it from working. What Miss Grant tells us about Lucina is, perhaps, a way for her to unveil her own problems and offer us a glimpse at what she feels might be another future. The final lines of Return to Elysium are revealing. "I stood alone on the cliff above the sea as dawn spread phoenix wings across the sky. Today Lucina would be given a new name." Whatever the reader's opinion may be about reincarnation and insights into past experiences, there can be no doubt about the impact and the beauty of Return to Elysium as a work of high literary merit. "No novelist writing today," wrote the Daily Telegraph, "possesses more completely, perhaps than Miss Grant, what Henry James called 'the sense of the past."' "It is," reviewed the London Times Literary Supplement, "a constantly interesting and impressive book."