 |
|
| Jan Morris | |
British journalist, travel writer and historian Jan Morris, "who wrote about history's sweep and the details of place with equal eloquence and chronicled her life as a transgender woman," died November 20, the New York Times reported. She was 94. As James Morris, she was a military officer in one of Britain's most renowned cavalry regiments, and then, as a world class journalist, "excelled as a travel writer, drawing literary portraits of places like Manhattan, Hong Kong, her beloved Wales (she was a dedicated Welsh nationalist), Oxford in England and Trieste in Italy."
James Morris married and had five children, but "became increasingly despondent over the issue of gender identity," the Times wrote. At 46, she underwent transition surgery, explaining the reasoning in the memoir Conundrum (1974), which was written two years after the operation under a new byline, Jan Morris: "I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.... I thought of public success itself, I suppose, as part of maleness, and I deliberately turned my back on it, as I set my face against manhood."
Her more than four dozen books, half of which were published after her transition, include Venice (1960), which won Britain's Heinemann Award for Literature; Destinations (1980); Last Letters From Hav (1985), a finalist for the Booker Prize; Thinking Again (2020); In My Mind's Eye: A Thought Diary (2018); Fisher's Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral (1995); The Hashemite Kings (1959), Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (1979); and a three-volume history of the British Empire. A final work, Allegorizings, will be published posthumously.
Angus Cargill, publishing director at Faber, which published Morris for more than 60 years, told the Bookseller: "We are extremely sad to hear the news of Jan Morris's death today. A trailblazer and an extraordinary life force, her wonderful, generous books opened up the world for so many people."
The Guardian noted that the greatest distance traveled by Morris "was not across the Earth's surface but between extraordinary identities: from being the golden-boy newspaper reporter James Morris to the female voyager and historian Jan Morris. James became Jan when what was then called a sex change was unexplored territory, from which she boldly sent back an early dispatch in 1974. The '70s reaction to that transformation was at best incomprehension, at worst hostility, especially literary hostility, but Morris wrote on.... She became an institution after having experienced the world, and herself in it, change radically in a lifetime."
In her preface to Among the Cities (1985), Morris wrote: "First to last, the world never ceased to astonish me, and I hope at least a little of that power to amaze, if nothing more profound, may be found between the covers of this book."