Jan Morris: Writer and trans pioneer who brought magic to the page

She excelled at conveying the atmosphere of a place and making you feel you were there

At the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in 2010 (Rex)

Jan Morris, the writer and transgender pioneer, was born in Somerset on 2 October 1926, the youngest of three siblings with a Welsh father from a line of “decent, proud people” and an English mother whose family of “modest country squires” was from the Mendips. Morris always refused to talk about her father who eventually died as a result of the Great War, insisting that “Life begins with me”. The life was an exceptionally interesting, full and varied one, justifying the statement.

Born James, Morris grew up knowing from the age of three or four that she “should really be a girl”. The feeling first came to her as she was sitting under the piano while her mother played Sibelius, but even though her conviction that she was in the “wrong body” never wavered, she kept the secret for 20 years.

When she was nine she was sent to board as a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford. And it was here while lying in the grass on summer afternoons that she learnt to take pleasure in the physical beauty of a place: “All my life I have felt in places, in landscapes as in cities, an allure that seems to me actually sexual, purer but no less exciting than the sexuality of the body.”

She went on to Lancing College, which moved from Sussex to Shropshire during the war, where she wasn’t exactly unhappy but where she often felt frightened and was frequently in trouble. She believed that sex and gender were different, feeling that gender is not physical but rather the “essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity”.

As soon as she could she left Lancing and, aged 17, volunteered for the army, joining the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers as a regimental intelligence officer. She served in Italy, Egypt and Palestine and after the war did a course in Arabic before working for a short while as a reporter for an Arab news agency in Cairo. She returned to Oxford, where she read English and edited the student magazine Cherwell. While she was doing her Arabic course she had met Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a Sri Lankan tea planter who had been in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. They felt an instant bond and Morris felt rescued by this intense love. They married in March 1949 and had five children during the Fifties and Sixties, three boys and two girls, one of whom, Virginia, died as a baby.

Morris never doubted that she had a vocation as a writer and during her 10 years of journalism worked for the Arab News Agency in Cairo, The Times (1951-56) and The Manchester Guardian (1957-62), which became The Guardian during her time at the paper. She covered the Everest expedition for The Times and was the writer who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on the morning of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. Although she felt that for sheer exuberance that last day on Everest was the best day of her life, she was also aware that she did not share the mountaineers’ burning urge to see it climbed and felt that conquering it was rather an anti-climax; nothing had been discovered, nothing made and nothing improved.

It was working for the Arab News Agency which most suited her and her job was to gather news from all over the Arab world and disseminate it among the Arab media. She was immensely popular as a foreign correspondent and many journalists modelled their writing on hers. She had a gift for finding exactly the right words for her reports; often when her fellow correspondents were sitting in a bar drinking, Morris would be out discovering more about a situation. Not that she was priggish; she always enjoyed drinking in moderation, particularly wine and especially Italian red wine.

In her thirties, as she began to find herself abhorrent, she knew that something had to be done about her situation. She met Dr Harry Benjamin in New York, a sympathetic doctor who was the first person to formally recognise the existence of trans people and it was Benjamin who reassured her that no trans person had ever been disabused of the idea of who they were and who suggested that altering the body was an option.

From the time they had met, Elizabeth had known of Morris’s knowledge that she was a woman and was always supportive. In 1964, Morris started taking hormonal pills and for a long while there was an ambiguity about her gender identity. In July 1972 she went to Casablanca on her own to have the operation where she felt “no flicker of disconsolance, no tremor of fear, no regret and no irresolution”. She chose Casablanca as the English doctor who would have performed the operation insisted that Elizabeth and Morris get divorced, which eventually they did, but in their own time. In 2008, they entered a civil partnership.

Her first book was Coast to Coast (1956) about a journey across America but her book on Everest, Coronation Everest, was not published until 1957 as The Times did not allow its journalists to write books. Morris described Alexander Kinglake, whose book Eothen made a deep and lasting impression on her, as “a merry genius with an exceedingly polished style”. From a base in France she wrote several books: Sultan in Oman (1957), The Market of Suleika (1957), South African Winter (1958) and The Hashemite Kings (1959) while continuing as a journalist for The Guardian, a paper on which she never felt completely at ease. 

When Venice was published in 1960 she was finally able to give up journalism and write books full-time. The book was an instant success and won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann award in 1961. Many people consider Venice to be not only Morris’s best book but also the best book ever written about a city. She excelled at conveying the atmosphere of a place and making you feel you were there. Jonathan Raban described Morris’s Rolling Stone essays, which were collected together in Destinations (1980), as “exquisite compositions of details ... The place is transformed into a literary pattern as full of different coloured threads as Henry James’s carpet. It is a process that comes very close to being pure magic.”

Morris claimed to have visited every major city in the world: “I have tried to get the hang of many cities.” And Cities (1963), Oxford (1965), Sydney (1992) and Trieste (2001) are some of her “city” books. She used sound effects in her writing and one of her strengths was the ability to capture the sense of a place at a certain period of time.

The Pax Britannica trilogy, which Morris considered “the best thing I’ve done”, took 10 years to write and was published between 1968 and 1978. Morris had been reading Gibbon and thought how well Gibbon’s Decline and Fall would translate into the decline of the British Empire. Although the trilogy was successful and went into several editions, it was not without its critics. Serious historians considered the research sloppy and gave it lukewarm reviews. Other books about the British Raj followed: The Spectacle of Empire (1982) and Stones of Empire (1983). Conundrum (1974) was the most autobiographical of Morris’s books. It was selected as one of the “100 key books of our time” in The Times. Her final book, Thinking Again, was published in March.

She was a fervent supporter of Welsh nationalism, liking the country for its “simplicity, decent people, rich landscape and sympathetic culture”. Her love of Wales, where she went to live in the late 1950s, was her “supreme pleasure and chief delight”.

She always looked for the positive in people and was generous and kind although she had an acerbic streak which kept her from being boring. She was enthusiastic about other writer’s work, often ringing to congratulate them on a particular sentence. She loved cats, describing her idea of paradise as “bowling across Castile in the Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn ... with the roof open, Mendelssohn on the radio and my Abyssinian cat beside me on the front seat”. She disliked people who quarrelled and grumbled, authority, the self-importance of the English legal system and science.

“I don’t think there is a writer alive who has Jan Morris’s serenity or strength,” wrote Paul Theroux about Destinations. It was her curiosity for facts interwoven with nuggets of information and the ability to capture the spirit of place which made her so readable. Her ambition was to be known for her contribution to literature and she will certainly be remembered as an essayist, novelist, critic and historian.

Jan Morris, writer and historian, born 2 October 1926, died 20 November 2020