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Joyce Reason (December 1894 - 18 September 1974). Born in West Ham, Essex, Joyce Reason was a prolific author of popular missionary biographies and accounts of the work of the London Missionary Society. She also wrote fiction and plays for young people.

Reason wrote missionary biographies of Mary Aldersey of China, James Chalmers of Papua, Albert Cook of Uganda, Kendall Gale of Madagascar, Wilfred Grenfell of Labrador, James Hannington of Uganda, Griffith John of China, David Jones of Madagascar, Liang Fa of China, Henry Nott of the South Seas, Ruatoka of Papua, Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand, Howard Somervell of India, and others. She also wrote popular biographies of John Bunyan, Robert Browne, Henry Barrowe, William Penn, Isobel Kuhn and Sadhu Sundar Singh of India.

Around 1950 she visited Uganda and Tanganyika to write an account of the Mission to Lepers work in East Africa, and also visited the Church of Scotland's leprosy settlement at Chogoria in Kenya. A number of her books were translated into French, German and Swedish.

Joyce Reason was a noted advocate of Christian books and in 1950 was a featured speaker at the Christianity in Books Exhibition at Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, together with the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral. She was considered an authority on the Kibbo Kift movement. She believed there was empirical evidence for the existence of the human soul. In response to a letter by a Professor Crew about life-termination by the individual, she suggested that the professor had not investigated evidence from ESP and psychology for regarding our lives as a part of something "much larger and more enduring".

Joyce Reason was noted as an author of historical fiction for young people. Her novel The Mad Miller of Wareham is set in King John's time in Dorset and concerns a plot to put Arthur of Brittany on the throne. The novel To Capture the King, concerns a Jacobite plot and smuggling on the Sussex coast, with mention of Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole.Bran the Bronze-Smith is a story set in the Bronze Age in the British Isles.

She also produced a number of works for the Sunday School "rewards" market which are still occasionally reprinted. The copyrights of these and many of her other works are now held by Lutterworth Press.

For the last 20 years of her life at least, Joyce Reason, a Congregationalist by denomination, lived at 102 Addison Rd, Guildford. She was not married.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Joyce Reason", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0