Author was pioneer of transgender movement
NEW YORK — Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94.
Morris died in Wales on Friday morning, according to her literary representative, United Agents. Her agent, Sophie Scard, confirmed her death. Morris had been in failing health. Additional details were not immediately available.
The British author lived as James Morris until the early 1970s, when she underwent surgery at a clinic in Casablanca and renamed herself Jan Morris. Her best-selling memoir “Conundrum,” which came out in 1974, continued the path of such earlier works as Christine Jorgensen’s “A Personal Autobiography” in presenting her decision as natural and liberating.
“I no longer feel isolated and unreal,” she wrote. “Not only can I imagine more vividly how other people feel: released at last from those old bridles and blinkers, I am beginning to know how I feel myself.”
Morris was a prolific and accomplished author and journalist who wrote dozens of books in a variety of genres and was a firsthand witness to history. As a young reporter for the Times, she accompanied a 1953 expedition to Asia led by Sir Edmund Hillary and, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, broke the news that Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to scale Mount Everest.
In 1956, for the Manchester Guardian, she helped break the news that French forces were secretly attacking Egypt during the so-called Suez Canal crisis that threatened to start a world war. The French and British, who also were allied against Egypt, both withdrew in embarrassment after denying the initial reports and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned within months. In the early 1960s, she covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem.
Morris went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her “Pax Britannica” histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris. In1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, “Last Letters from Hav,” about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author’s globespanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.
Morris’ other works included the memoirs “Herstory” and
“Pleasures of a Tangled Life,” the essay collections “Cities” and “Locations” and the anthology “The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000.” A collection of diary entries, “In My Mind’s Eye,” came out in 2019, and a second volume is scheduled for January. “Allegorizings,“a nonfiction book of personal reflections that she wrote more than a decade ago and asked not be published in her lifetime, also will be released in 2021.
To the outside world, James Morris seemed to enjoy an exemplary male life. She was 17 when she joined the British army during World War II and served as an intelligence officer in Palestine. In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, with whomshe had five children. (One died in infancy).
Morris and her wife were divorced, but they remained close, and, in 2008, formalized a new bond in a civil union. They also promised to be buried together, under a stone inscribed in both Welsh and English: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”