Juanita Casey

Juanita Casey (10 October 1925 – 24 October 2012) was a poet, playwright, novelist and artist as well as a horse and zebra trainer and breeder. Her writing celebrates her time in Ireland and the New Forest. Having been critically neglected, Casey returned to prominence with the July 2022 reissue of her darkly comic and poetic 1971 novel, The Horse of Selene.

Early life Juanita Casey was born in 1925 in England and adopted at birth into a wealthy Southampton-based brewing family by Gerald Haw Taunton Barlow (1878–1952) and his wife Mary (née Bischoff) and named Joy Barlow. Her true heritage has always remained in doubt. 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. 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. It is suspected the story Casey was told may hold some truth as Newman is a common British Romani surname.

She remained in close contact with her extended family, especially an uncle, Andrew Walter Barlow, who had a farm in Herefordshire. which they sailed to Kinsale, Ireland. In between sailings from their moorings in Fowey and Penzance, their son William was born (in Bournemouth) in 1947. Based in Cornwall, Juanita, an accomplished equestrian artist, began selling her work through Newlyn art galleries as well as in London. made about the Gypsy festival of Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer in the Camargue in which she acted as interpreter.