Writer broke news of Everest conquest and wrote amemoir of changing sex

Jan Morris, who has died aged 94, was a prolific author of history and travel books, distinguished by their narrative verve and scintillating prose. The reliance of her style on surface brilliance was perhaps a reflection of her own complex personality, which for much of her life concealed immense inner turmoil. Having initially found fame as the reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest in 1953, the former James Morris attracted permanent notoriety by changing sex in 1972.

That decision, and the curiosity it continued to provoke, rather detracted from Morris’ standing as awriter. This was at its highest in the

1960s, the period when the best of her travel books were written.

Her style was magpie-like, alighting gleefully on anecdotes and gossip that made for pleasurable reading. These titbits were surrounded by amosaic of adjectives that often captured the spirit of a place, but which some readers found offputting. She once described herself as ‘‘A wandering swank’’. More disciplined were her writing habits; she was a trenchant researcher and never wrote fewer than 3000 words a day.

It was cities, her favourite places, that seemed to respond best to her touch. Her most completely successfulworks were Oxford (1965) and Venice (1960). Of her more than 40 books, the most celebrated were her threevolume history of the British Empire. A triptych that took as its centrepiece the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, described in Pax Britannica (1968), it demonstrated Morris’ gift for research and sweeping narrative.

James Humphry Morris was born in Somerset, western England. His father had been gassed inWorld War I and died while James was still a child. His earliest memory, aged about 3, was of sitting under the piano that his mother was playing, convinced – as Jan Morris would describe in Conundrum (1974), one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality calmly and without prurience – that he should really be a girl.

In 1936, aged 9, James went to the choir school of Christ Church, Oxford, where he would silently add to morning prayers his own plea: ‘‘And please God, let me be a girl.’’ After a brief spell as a journalist with the Western Daily Press, Morris joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers in 1944, serving in Italy and Palestine, and acting as the regiment’s intelligence officer. After the war, Morris stayed in the Middle East, working for the Cairo-based Arab News Agency. Then in 1949 he returned to Oxford, reading English at Christ Church and editing Cherwell, the undergraduates’ newspaper. He then joined The Times, where he became a foreign correspondent.

His life changed in 1953, when he was chosen to accompany the Everest expedition.

The Times was sponsoring the attempt and had sole rights to news of its progress. Morris was expected to report this and prevent other journalists from doing so.

He instituted a system of Sherpa runners who carried coded reports from Everest to a radio at Kathmandu; the journey took aweek. A novice mountaineer, Morris had to regularly brave the icefield to bring his copy down from Camp IV at 24,000ft. His cunning and courage were rewarded with one of the great journalistic scoops when he exclusively reported that Everest had been conquered. The news reached London for the morning of Elizabeth II’s coronation.

He knew, however, that he did not wish to make journalism his career. Instead he turned to travel writing. But for all his literary success, his doubts about his gender continued to grow. His efforts better to understand his condition were initially rebuffed by British doctors, before he was finally taken seriously by German-American surgeon Harry Benjamin, who became known for his work with transgender people.

In 1964 James Morris began to take the first of 12,000 female hormone pills and to live a double life, spending half the week as a woman in Oxford, the rest as aman in London. Once his children had grown up, in 1972 he went to a Casablanca clinic to complete the physical alteration with surgery.

The Jan Morris that emergedwas a curiously old-fashioned sort of woman. Cheerful and resolute, she resembled nothing so much as a game Victorian spinster; no less Victorian were her attitudes, gladly ceding first place in the world to men. Some critics felt the transition had removed something from her writing.

She continued to share her home in Wales with her former wife, Elizabeth, mother of their three sons and a daughter; another daughter died in infancy.

Elizabeth had known of her husband’s plight since they met. Theywere formally divorced after Morris underwent surgery, but planned to be buried together.

In 2008, they reaffirmed their relationship with a civil partnership. Elizabeth survives her with their children. –

He would silently add to morning prayers his own plea: ‘‘And please God, let me be a girl.’’