Jan Morris: Titanic Journey

Jan Morris, an observational genius with lyricism and humor, is considered Britain’s one of the best-loved writers, the author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books.

Born as James Humphry Morris in 1926, a childhood spent amidst Oxford’s Gothic beauty and military service in Italy, Palestine, and Egypt,  were followed by a career as an internationally feted foreign correspondent, died in  2020, on Transgender Remembrance Day. It was this experience that helped to inspire her and later inform Morris’s landmark Pax Britannica trilogy on the British Empire.

In 1953, the newly appointed 27-year-old foreign editor of the Times was the only journalist allowed to join Hunt, and Hillary’s summit conquering triumph broke on the morning of the late Queen’s coronation.  Morris’s covering of the trial of Adolf Eichmann spanned many of the twentieth century’s defining moments.

In 1999, Morris was awarded an OBE wearing an outfit as conservatively feminine as that of her diminutive monarch, the Queen looked mystified. Morris was 46 when she completed her gender confirmation in 1972 and became renowned as a transgender pioneer. Conundrum, the groundbreaking memoir in which Morris described the painful journey towards becoming her own true self, brought fame, respect, and notoriety. The oldest and youngest three of Morris’s three sons shared their mother Elizabeth’s admiration for Jan’s courage. Suki, the couple’s daughter told Clements that the family knew a different and darker character than Jan’s public image.

 

Morris’s second son, Henry, left England for India a year before his father’s surgery. In 2021, Henry commented on Jan that “ We were introduced, but we never actually got to know each other”.

Jan guarded her privacy during her lifetime, references to the deliberate destruction of many personal papers suggested that much will remain mysterious.

Morris always knew herself to be female. Morris compelled by law to divorce Elizabeth when changing gender, remarried her as soon as same-sex marriages were legalized. According to Morris “We never begrudged each other our separate lives”. In the final chapter, Clements is most open in a final chapter that discusses a change for the worse when James became Jan.

She went on to live happily with her wife Elizabeth in Wales for another five decades, and never stopped writing and publishing.

 Clements brings for the first time, the many strands of Morris’s rich life, portraying a person of extraordinary talent, and curiosity.

 Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides by Paul Clements, Scribe £25, 608 pages.