Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides — journey of a lifetime

Born as James Morris in 1926, Jan Morris led a remarkable life and ended it with remarkable prescience by dying, in 2020, on Transgender Remembrance Day. The author of 58 books and enough articles and reviews to fill a small hay barn, she began her seven decades of travelling by working as a wartime intelligence officer based in Egypt and Palestine. It was an experience that would help to inspire 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 Everest expedition. Morris’s news of Hillary’s summit-conquering triumph broke on the morning of the late Queen’s coronation. Reminded of that fact in 1999, when Ms Morris accepted a CBE (while wearing an outfit as conservatively feminine as that of her diminutive monarch), the Queen looked understandably perplexed.

Morris was 46 when she completed her gender confirmation in 1972. 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 of Morris’s three sons shared their mother Elizabeth’s admiration for Jan’s courage. Suki, the couple’s more critical daughter, told Paul Clements — a journalist and Morris’s first biographer — that the family knew a different and darker character than Jan’s public persona of unwavering bonhomie. Morris’s second son, Henry, left England for India a year before his father’s surgery. In 2021, Henry opaquely commented on Jan that “we were introduced, but we never actually got to know each other.”

Getting to know Morris was never easy, as even Clements’ careful biography shows. She had guarded her privacy during her lifetime; references to the deliberate destruction of many personal papers suggest that much will remain unknowable. But Clements’ respectful approach does raise some fascinating questions. If Morris always knew herself to be female (as she stated on many occasions), why did she choose to embark on such a conventionally manly career? Was it wanderlust or self-knowledge that caused her to travel abroad and alone with such feverish frequency after a youthful marriage to Elizabeth Tuckniss?

Morris, compelled by law to divorce Elizabeth when changing gender, loved her enough to remarry her as soon as same-sex marriages were legalised. And Elizabeth’s point of view? According to Morris, “we never begrudged each other our separate lives.” Elizabeth herself offered no comment. “My mum,” her daughter told Clements, “did not have a voice.”

Clements is at his best and most open in a final chapter that discusses what some readers perceived as — stylistically — a change for the worse when James became Jan. Paul Theroux was among those who detected a definite shift of gears from the journalist who wittily described Bogotá in Cities (1963) as “dignified but highly strung, like Edinburgh with twitches”) to the more self-aware Jan, who in Trieste, and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001) described the Italian city as “a sort of mirror-image of myself”. Invited to comment on whether gender confirmation had altered her sensibility or prose style, Jan Morris thought not. “I write as I do,” she said, “because I’m me.”

Demure though Clements’ own prose is, he offers glimpses of a titanic ego, and not just in the “JM” on the weathervane above Jan Morris’s Welsh home, or the petulant sensitivity to any criticism of her work. While it’s intriguing to learn about Morris’s self-indulgent side (a Rolls in the garage; a joyous use of expense accounts to stay only in the best hotels), admirers might quail at the grandeur of some of her assertions. There may be a hint of playfulness in Morris’s proposal that her “entire oeuvre” represents “an enormous ego biography”. None is apparent in the announcement that “I am only shifting the basis of my ambiguity.” An artful deployer of quotations, Clements refrains from comment.

Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides by Paul Clements, Scribe £25.00, 608 pages

Miranda Seymour is the author of ‘I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys’

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