Transgender trailblazer who brought a unique perspective to travel writing
Jan Morris, travel writer and transgender pioneer
Born: October 2, 1926;
Died: November 20, 2020.
JAN Morris, who has died aged 94, was a celebrated travel writer and journalist who became one of the most high-profile pioneers of the transgender movement. At the height of her fame as a writer, she underwent surgery in Casablanca and subsequently wrote a best-selling memoir about her experience
Patiently, honestly and lyrically, she explained her feelings and why she took the decision: it was natural and liberating. “I feel myself,” she said. By the time Morris took the decision to undergo surgery in the 1970s, she had already established a considerable reputation as a journalist of great persistence and skill, and a travel writer with a talent for using the small details of some of the great cities of the world to summon up an immersive and intoxicating atmosphere. She was the only journalist to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their 1953 ascent of Everest and broke the news of their success. She was also a finalist for the Booker prize for her genre-defying fantasy novel, Hav.
Morris did work as a historian, too, and was celebrated for her trilogy on the social history of the British Empire, known collectively as Pax Britannica. The three books were Pax Britannica (1968), Heaven’s Command (1973) and Farewell the Trumpets (1978), a body of work that is also notable because she began it as James Morris and concluded it as Jan Morris.
Morris’s transition occurred in the middle 1970s, so the best she could hope for at the time was a kind of bemused curiosity. There was some of that, but there was a lot of criticism and sneering too, including some critics who questioned whether she would be quite as good a writer as a woman as she had been as a man.
Morris herself, however, always explained her feelings with great patience. She had had an epiphany, she said, long before she even went to school. She was sitting under the piano at home – her mother was a musician – and remembered thinking, with complete clarity, that she had been born in the wrong body. Later, she prayed to God for help: “please God, let me be a girl”
She was born James Humphrey Morris and grew up in Somerset where her mother was a church organist and her father was an engineer. She attended Lancing College in West Sussex and then the cathedral choir school at Christ Church in Oxford and dabbled in journalism when she was 16 at the Western Daily Press in Bristol.
However, the Second World War then intervened. Morris was colourblind and couldn’t join the Navy so signed up for the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers and was commissioned as in intelligence officer. It was also his first experience of foreign travel and after demob he settled in Cairo for a while, where he worked for a news agency.
On his return to the UK, he studied English at Oxford and edited the student newspaper, before joining The Times, where he brought the newspaper a world exclusive. Morris had travelled with Edmund Hillary as far as the base camp on Everest and broke the news he had reached the summit. He was concerned that other journalists might steal his story though, so his despatch back to London was coded: “Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.” The office
knew what it meant and the news was broken to the world.
Morris’s successful journalistic career continued at the Guardian – she left The Times in 1956 because she was unable to support the newspaper’s editorial line in the Suez crisis. Writing for the Guardian, she helped break the news that French forces were secretly attacking Egypt. The French and British, who also were allied against Egypt, both withdrew in embarrassment after denying the initial reports and the Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, resigned within months.
Morris’s move into travel writing came in 1956 with Coast to Coast, which recounted a year travelling across the United States by car, train, ship and plane. Other lucrative commissions followed and she left newspapers to focus full-time on writing books. In all, she wrote more than 40 across several genres, but it was her travel books that attracted a cult following, particularly her books on Venice. She wrote four books about the city, which she had first experienced when she was posted there with the British Army, and it remained one of her favourite places in the world. She could always recall, she said, the smell of the mud, incense, fish, age, filth and velvet. “Wherever you go in life,” she wrote, “you will feel somewhere over your shoulder, a pink castellated, shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinnacles”.
Her memoir on her gender, Conundrum, came in 1974 and dealt with the subject with an engaging frankness. In the book, she told how, after her operation, she no longer real unreal and isolated. “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.”
She also wrote about her relationship with Elizabeth
Tuckniss, whom Morris married in 1949 and with whom she had five children (one died in infancy). Tuckniss knew about Morris’s feelings about her gender at an early stage and supported her, and although the couple formally divorced, they remained close and lived together until the end of Morris’s life. They entered a civil partnership in 2008.
Morris’s 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, was published in 2019, and a second volume is scheduled for January. Allegorizings, a book of personal reflections that she wrote more than a decade ago and asked not to be published in her lifetime, will be released in 2021. She was made a CBE in 1999 and is survived by Elizabeth and four of their children.