E. L. Grant Watson was the elder of two sons of Reginald Grant Watson, gentleman and barrister, and his wife, Lucy nee Fuller. After the death of his father and brother, his mother devoted her life to her surviving child. The Darwinism she had absorbed from her husband led her to decide Grant Watson should become a zoologist and hopefully a second Darwin.
Grant Watson was sent to an unconventional school, Bedales, whose inspiration came from Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman and R. W. Emerson. Though subjected to bullying and a cult of 'purity', he enjoyed a great deal of freedom to roam the countryside. His mother's second husband, a distinguished classical scholar from Cambridge, ensured he was accepted to study biology at the University of Cambridge. He graduated with first class honours in 1909. Initially, Grant Watson taught at Bedales but rejected the position of Inspector of Schools offered by the Education Board.
Grant Watson visited Australia on a number of occasions. In 1910-1911 he was a member of a scientific expedition into north-western Australia led by the social anthropologist, Alfred Radcliffe Brown, providing an experience from which he drew in his later writing. He fell in love with the Australian bush, writing 'Those first weeks that I spent in the bush were rich, not so much in outer as in inner experience ... In psychological interpretation, it is, I suppose, that the mild, innocent and aloof quality of that virgin territory appears as a symbol of the unconscious, as a symbol of all that civilisation has chosen to disregard.' Dorothy Green (in 'Elliott Lovegood Grant Watson: Introduction') argues that 'The empathy and the humility in such passages from his autobiography are far more profound than anything D. H. Lawrence was able to achieve during his visit to Western Australia in 1922, and the symbolism of the unconscious points forward to Patrick White's Voss.'
Grant Watson's motivation to become a professional biologist seems to have dissipated prior to World War I. A meeting with Joseph Conrad in 1915 to whom he had sent the manuscript of his first novel was decisive in turning him towards a professional writing career. He had been writing essays and stories for the English Review since 1913. For some time, he lived among a Bohemian set of artists and theatre people.
The death of his mother in 1918 left Grant Watson with a small income to support his writing. In 1919, he married Katherine Hannay and increasingly wrote about the English countryside, producing a large number of nature classics. Grant Watson practised pyschoanalysis privately with some success, lectured for the BBC and was one of the first English critics to illuminate the symbolism of Herman Melville for an English audience. He communicated with a wide range of leading thinkers of his day including Havelock Ellis and Carl Jung.
Grant Watson's non-fiction works include With the Australian Aborigines (1930), Enigmas of Natural History (1936?), Wonders of Natural History (1938), Man and His Universe (1940?), Nature Abounding (1941), Profitable Wonders: Some Problems of Plant and Animal Life (1949), Nature's Changing Course (1961), The Mystery of Physical Life (1964) and Animals in Splendour (1967). He wrote six novels with an Australian setting and is widely admired for his descriptions of the Western Australian landscape. Grant Watson's use of the landscape and his concern for the welfare of Aborigines anticipates later works by writers such as Patrick White, Xavier Herbert, and Randolph Stow (qq.v.).
