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Jan Morris, the Celebrated Travel Writer Who Elegantly Chronicled Her Own Journey of Transition, Dies at 94

Jan Morris, who spent the first half of her life as James Morris, a journalist who found global fame chronicling Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, and then the second as a celebrated essayist and one of the most famous transgender women in the world, died Friday at the age of 94.

No matter what topic Morris covered over the course of her nearly eight-decade career—from travel to history to her own transition—she did so with insight, elegance and unflinching honesty. As one reviewer wrote when her landmark memoir, Conundrum, was reissued in 2006 with a new introduction by Morris, “ Conundrum remains an exquisite read — a rare gift of empathic insight into an experience which most of us will never have but which is strewn with elements of the struggle for belonging, acceptance, and authenticity that most of us face daily in one form or another.” Her death was confirmed by her son, Twm Morys , who said his mother died in a hospital near the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, where she lived. He did not name the cause.

Over the course of her career, Morris published more than 30 books, their subjects ranging from a coast-to-coast journey across the United States in the 1950s to a celebrated “biography” of Venice that remains one of the most-read books about that storied city . Among Morris’s most notable achievements was the three-volume Pax Britannica , which chronicled the history of the British empire from the earliest days of the East India Company to the disruptive post-colonial years of the 1960s. In 1968, The Times Literary Supplement described Pax Britannica as “a tour de force, offering a vast amount of information and description, with a style full of sensuality.” And in the The New York Times Book Review , the British biographer Philip Magnus called it “a successful portrayal of what the Empire looked and felt like in a variety of places at the end of the 19th Century — how it ticked, who pulled the strings, and the practical ends and ideals it served.”

Morris wrote the first two volumes as James and the last as Jan. In 1997, she was asked by an interviewer for The Paris Review whether the change of genders altered in any way her perspective on history.

“I truly don’t think at all, really,” she responded . “I’ve reread the books myself with this in mind. I don’t think there is a great deal of difference. It was a purely intellectual or aesthetic, artistic approach to a fairly remote subject. It wasn’t anything, I don’t think, that could be affected much by my own personal affairs . . . less than other things I’ve written.”  

Another two dozen books came after Morris’s transition. Besides Conundrum , originally published in 1974, they included Destinations (1980), a collection of travel essays; the novel Last Letters From Hav (1985), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize; and Fisher’s Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral (1995), a biography of the British naval reformer John Arbuthnot Fisher. Her last book, a collection of essays titled Thinking Again , was published in 2019 .

Before all that was Hillary’s headline-making ascent of Mt. Everest when Morris was a young correspondent for The Times of London . It is hard to overstate the impact Hillary’s conquest—and thus Morris’s journalistic scoop—had on the newspaper-reading world back in 1953. The Times had secured the exclusive rights to cover the Everest expedition, which was led by Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer , and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide from Nepal, and picked Morris to cover that journey. As The New York Times later wrote, “Filing dispatches by using guides as relays between the expedition’s overnight camps and the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, [Morris] wrote of deep snow dragging at the explorers’ feet, sweat trickling down their backs, their faces burning from cold, ice and wind.” Morris would later describe the event as one of the high points of her career. “I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest,” she wrote in Conundrum . “The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me.”

Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on October 2, 1926, in Somerset, England, the youngest of three to an English mother, Enid, a church organist, and a Welsh father, Walter, an engineer and World War I veteran who died when Morris was 12. Morris started her career in journalism at the age of 16, working as a reporter for the Western Daily Press in Bristol.

At 22, while living in Cairo, where she was working for the local Arab News Agency, Morris met and married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the British daughter of a tea planter. The couple raised four children (a fifth died in infancy) and stayed together—first as spouses, then as ex-spouses, and finally as domestic partners—for nearly 70 years. (Tuckniss survives her.)

In 1964, Morris, whose fame as a journalist had continued to grow through her coverage of such events as the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal , and the American spy Francis Gary Power , started taking hormone pills to begin her transition at the advice of a doctor she met in New York . Then, in 1972, at the age of 46, Morris traveled to Casablanca and underwent gender-reassignment surgery. Conundrum , which chronicles those events, was her first book published under the name Jan Morris. As she wrote of the surgery, “I had reached Identity.” 

The opening lines of Conundrum soon became among the most famous of any 20th-century memoir: “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.”

Morris was not the first to make headlines for her transition— Christine Jorgensen came 20 years before her—but she was probably the person who possessed the most pre-transition fame until Caitlyn Jenner covered Vanity Fair in 2015 .

The impact of Conundrum was immediate, and it continues to draw raves from later generations of readers. As the author Jonathan Ames noted recently , “This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That its subject matter is Jan Morris’s transsexual journey almost seems secondary to her incredible prose and the clarity of her honesty and introspection. Beyond the issue of gender, she searches for an answer to that most elusive of questions: who am I?” (Though most of the book’s initial reviews were laudatory, not everyone was a fan. Reviewing Conundrum for The New York Times Book Review , Rebecca West gave it grudging respect while seeming to wonder why Morris felt the need to change genders, much less make it the subject of her book . For good measure, West sniped, “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a women, and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly as intelligent as James Morris used to be.”)

Despite the enhanced celebrity her transition brought her, Morris maintained that her day-to-day life was little changed. As she wrote in Conundrum , her longtime Welsh neighbors seemed unfazed by the new person in their midst:“The Welsh are kind to most people and especially kind to their own.”

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Besides her many books and essays, Morris also wrote elegant travel pieces for Vogue , on such varied subjects as Crete, the Napa Valley, Trieste, and her adopted homeland of Wales. Her editor at Vogue , Richard Alleman, recalled this weekend the pleasurable experience of working with Morris. “She was a breeze to work with–editing her meant adding or deleting a comma here and there and nothing else because she was such a fine writer,” Alleman said. “She was incredibly polite and kind and appreciative of the editor’s work, even if we had done practically nothing.”

In that Paris Review article, Morris was asked if she was initially drawn to travel as a kind of metaphorical escape from the life she then lived as a man. “Well, I used to think it hadn’t anything to do with escape because I’ve always enjoyed traveling; it’s one of my great pleasures,” Morris answered. “My original travels were not quite voluntary. I went abroad with the British army, and there wasn’t much sense of escape in that. But later I did begin to believe that maybe there was some sort of allegorical meaning to my traveling. I thought that the restlessness I was possessed by was, perhaps, some yearning, not so much for the sake of escape as for the sake of quest: a quest for unity, a search for wholeness. I certainly didn’t think of it that way in the beginning, but I’ve come to think it might be so.”  

Though a trailblazer, Morris was not one to dwell too deeply on the significant role she played in the history of LGBTQ rights.

As The New York Times noted in 2019, when her last book of essays, In My Mind’s Eye , was serialized on BBC Radio , giving her another jolt of late-in-life fame, Morris had always been impatient with reporters’ questions about transgender politics, “possibly because she made peace with her own decisions so long ago.” As she told the paper of her transition , “I’ve never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be…I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body.”

She made a similar point in Conundrum, writing, “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s stem or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones.”

In one of her last interviews, conducted in March of this year, Morris talked of her advanced age and the realization that her life was nearing its close. “I am sorry to be so indistinct,” she told a reporter for The Guardian , when briefly losing her train of thought while recounting an anecdote. “The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.” 

And while she might not have meant it to be, the final passage in her 2001 book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, could well serve as an epitaph. “As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to Heaven, the angler having packed it in for the night and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me,” Morris wrote. “Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor; but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.”

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Jan Morris, artful travel writer who broke many boundaries, dies at 94

As a young reporter, Jan Morris was on the mountainside, at 22,000 feet, when the first expedition in history reached the top of Mount Everest. She reported on wars and revolutions around the globe, published dozens of elegant books exploring far-flung places and times and was regarded as perhaps the greatest travel writer of her time.

Yet the most remarkable journey of her life was across a private border, when she cast off her earlier identity as James Morris and became Jan Morris.

A writer of extraordinary range and productivity, and one of the world’s first well-known transgender public figures, Ms. Morris was 94 when she died Nov. 20 at a hospital in the Welsh town of Pwllheli. Her son Twm Morys announced the death in a statement but did not state the cause.

Jan Morris spent her first 45 years as James Morris, who had been a British cavalry officer, a World War II veteran and a dashing reporter renowned for international adventures and evocative writing.

“On the face of things,” a onetime colleague, David Holden, wrote in 1974, “a less likely candidate for a sex change than James Morris would have been hard to imagine. His whole career and reputation had created an aura of glamorous and successful masculinity.”

In the 1940s, James Morris lived on the Nile on the houseboat of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In 1953, never having climbed a mountain before, James joined the expedition of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and came within 7,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Scrambling back down, James delivered the news that Everest had been conquered for the first time in history. The Times of London printed the story on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

“I went up an unknown,” Ms. Morris told the New York Times in 1997, “and came down the most famous journalist in the world.”

Constantly on the move, James Morris reported from Israel, Algeria, South Africa and Japan, primarily for British newspapers and magazines, published books and was praised by New York Times critic Orville Prescott as a “poet and a phrase-maker with a fine flair for the beauties of the English language.”

James Morris covered the Moscow show trial of U.S. spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers and the trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann. In Cuba, James interviewed the charismatic revolutionary Che Guevara and in a 1960 dispatch published in the New York Times offered a grim assessment of what the future would hold for the country under Fidel Castro. ”

“It is a strikingly immature regime — not just in age but in style and judgment too. The rulers of Havana reduce all things to simple right or wrong, East or West, in or out, yours or ours. There still is good in many of their notions, a surviving streak of idealism, a genuine quality of young inspiration. But there is little subtlety, no experience, and scarcely a jot of that prime political commodity, irony.”

In 1960, James Morris published the best-selling “Venice” (called “The World of Venice” in the United States), creating a distinctive style of travel writing, a literary dreamscape evoking past and present at once, as sensory impressions and a poignant awareness of what some called the “psychology of place” were threaded into an elegant, flowing prose.

Venice — for centuries an independent republic before it became part of Italy — “was something unique among the nations, half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia. She . . . even had her own calendar, in which the year began on March 1st, and the days began in the evening.”

Other books followed, about New York, Britain, South America and Spain, as well as an ambitious three-volume history of the British Empire that was so authoritatively written that critics were reminded of Edward Gibbon’s monumental 18th-century chronicle of ancient Rome.

James Morris had public acclaim and a seemingly contented family life as the married father of four children — but there remained a central, inescapable fact: a misaligned gender identity, “a life distorted.”

“I was three or perhaps four years old,” Jan Morris wrote in her first book under that name, the autobiographical “Conundrum” (1974), “when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well” — sitting under the piano, while her mother played Sibelius — “and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

Before marrying Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949, James Morris explained this sense of inner conflict, telling her that “each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine, my entombment within the male physique more terrible to me.”

James Morris began hormone treatments in 1964 and consulted with Harry Benjamin , an American physician and the author of “The Transsexual Phenomenon” (1966). In 1972, James went to Casablanca for transition surgery, choosing a doctor experienced in the procedure.

Two weeks later, Jan Morris flew back to England, where she was greeted by Elizabeth. Under British law at the time, they had to obtain a divorce because same-sex couples were not permitted to marry. Still, they continued to live together.

“To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” Ms. Morris wrote in “Conundrum,” which became an international best seller. “It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous.”

Many readers admired Ms. Morris’s revelatory candor, but others were confused or hostile. In Esquire magazine, Nora Ephron disparaged “Conundrum” as “a mawkish and embarrassing book. . . . Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-old girl.”

In any case, Ms. Morris continued with her writing life much as before, only wearing skirts, necklaces, a nimbus of graying hair and a perpetual smile.

She completed the final volume of the British Empire trilogy and continued to wander the globe, writing for Rolling Stone and other publications. The books seem to pour out of her, often with simple titles such as “Travels,” “Journeys,” “Destinations” and “Among the Cities.”

She became almost a revered figure, considered a founder of modern travel writing, even though she resisted the title.

“The reason why I don’t regard myself as a travel writer is that the books have never tried to tell somebody what a city is like,” she told the Independent in 2001. “All I do is say how I’ve felt about it, how it impinged on my sensibility.”

Ms. Morris was often asked which city in the world, out of the hundreds she knew, was her favorite. She invariably named Manhattan and Venice, both of which she visited every year.

But she also had an abiding attachment to Trieste, a somewhat eccentric port city in northeastern Italy. Ms. Morris first saw Trieste in 1945, then returned periodically over the years before publishing in 2001 what she considered perhaps her finest travel book, “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.”

“The nostalgia that I felt here 50 years ago was, I realize now, nostalgia not for a lost Europe, but for a Europe that never was, and has yet to be,” she wrote. “But we can still hope and try, and be grateful that we are where we are, in this ever-marvelous and fateful corner of the world.”

James Humphry Morris was born Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon, England.

At 17, James Morris joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers , a storied British cavalry unit, and served in Italy and the Middle East during World War II. James later worked for a news agency in Cairo, then returned to Britain to study at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1951.

After working for the Times of London for several years, James joined what was then the Manchester Guardian in 1956 as “wandering correspondent,” winning a George Polk Award for journalism in 1960. A year later, James became a freelance writer and received a master’s degree in English literature from Oxford.

It was in Oxford where James Morris made the first tentative steps toward becoming Jan, going out in public wearing dresses and makeup, years before athletes Renée Richards and Caitlyn Jenner were heralded as transgender pioneers.

In 2008, Ms. Morris and Elizabeth Tuckniss Morris were united in a civil union.

“I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth Morris told Britain’s Evening Standard. “We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.”

They settled in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, with one of their sons living next door. The couple arranged for a headstone with an inscription in Welsh and English: “Here are two friends, at the end of one life.”

In addition to Elizabeth Morris and their son, Twm Morys, survivors include three other children. Another child, a daughter, died in infancy.

If anything, Jan Morris was a more productive writer than James had been. She often published two or three books a year, and more than 45 in all. Besides her accounts of travel, history and autobiography, she wrote two novels and biographical studies of Abraham Lincoln and British admiral John Fisher.

In 2018, she published “Battleship Yamato,” about an ill-fated Japanese warship that was sunk in 1945. It was believed to be one of the last books about World War II written by a veteran of the war. She continued to publish essays about her life in Wales, her memories and what she called the “tangled web” of her life until shortly before her death.

“I spent half my life traveling in foreign places,” Ms. Morris wrote in “Conundrum.” “I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately recognized that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.”

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Why the mystique of Wales gave strength to a legendary writer

With Welsh legends and landscapes as her muse, Jan Morris circled the globe—and reinvented travel writing.

Celebrated travel writer Jan Morris, who died November 20, 2020, lived and worked in the scenic Nant Gwynant valley in westernWales.

She was at ease in the world, but she was never more herself than when at home in Wales. Author and journalist Jan Morris, who died last week at 94, embraced Wales as her physical, intellectual, and spiritual foundation. “I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness,” she said.

She loved its rugged mountains, the spring-green hills where sheep grazed, even the gloomy weather, which was ideal for writing by the fireplace. In Wales , Morris saw an ancient nation that retained its indomitable essence. The endurance of identity was among her great themes.

Morris would often take visitors to lunch at a handsome, ivy-cloaked climbers’ lodge in northwest Wales. The lodge is a converted 200-year-old farmhouse called Pen-Y-Gwryd . One could say it was here, in 1953, that the first successful ascent of Mount Everest began, with Morris joining training climbs up nearby Mount Snowdon.

Late in life, Welsh historian, author, and travel writer Jan Morris is shown near her home in Wales.

Morris was a 26-year-old reporter for the Times of London , the sole journalist on the British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt that was the first to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain.

( Related: Hike the Wales Way to see the best of this ancient land. )

On May 29, 1953, when Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary reached the summit, Morris hiked thousands of vertical feet above Everest base camp to be the first to get the news. Upon learning that Hillary and Tenzing had succeeded, Morris raced back to base camp, roped up with another climber, then hustled down the mountain and sent an encoded message back to London . The news reached the British on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, giving the nation another reason to celebrate.

Morris later described the Everest scoop as the first and only of her career, which spun her out from Wales to travel the globe, filing lyrical, impressionist essays from Venice , Sydney , New York , Hong Kong . But she’d always return to Wales.

Finding a home and kinship

Born in 1926 to a Welsh father and English mother in Somerset, England—140 miles west of London and just across Bristol Bay from Cardiff, Wales’s capital—Morris loved Wales and wanted to share it.

The Welsh name for the country is Cymru, a word rooted in “kinship.” This appealed greatly to Morris, as did the defiantly proud red dragon that commands the national flag. Despite seven centuries of domination by England, the region of northern Wales that Morris called home remains irrefutably Welsh.

The Welsh language, one of the oldest in Europe, is still spoken widely there, and national pride is so strong that visitors can be initially suspect. Yet the moment outsiders show even a hint of sympathy for the Welsh cause or appreciation of the place, they’re typically welcomed with open arms.

“I live, though, in a Wales of my own, a Wales in the mind, grand with high memories, poignant with melancholy,” Morris writes in her 2002 book, A Writer’s House in Wales , published by National Geographic. Although Morris fiercely supported Wales and all it stands for, she recognized that she had adopted her country; she wasn’t wholly of it. The weathervane gracing her home in Llanystumdwy on the Llŷn Peninsula symbolizes her dual Welsh and English ancestry: E and W mark east and west; G and D stand for gogledd and de , the Welsh words for north and south.

Morris described her small home in Trefan Morys as “a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an exemplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country.” And she opened her doors to countless travelers over the decades.

A man and his dogs rest at the viewpoint from Castell Dinas Bran, a medieval castle far above the Dee Valley in Wales.

Beddgelert is a pretty Welsh village known for the legend of a faithful dog by the same name.

“She had a choice, being half English and half Welsh. She chose Wales,” says photographer Jim Richardson, recalling lunch with Morris in the Smoke Room at Pen-Y-Gwryd. The lodge, festooned with ropes and oxygen tanks and boots used on the Everest expedition, was the site of many reunions.

“But most revealing was her ability to find the richness in this simple Welsh countryside,” says Richardson. “As we drove up the Nant Gwynant valley past Mount Snowdon, she was as likely to point with pride to the sheep as she was to the mountain; she did not need epic places in order to see epic things.” Morris told the story of racing down Everest, “as if she were sitting around with some Welsh farmers talking about sheep shearing. She laughed. It was fun, this world of hers.”

Wales, for Morris, was both a place to discover and a place to define. “You can see from the way she writes about Wales that her heart and soul is in it,” said author Paul Theroux in an email after Morris died. “In a word, Jan was passionate about Wales—the land, people, the language—and she was subtle yet forceful in writing about it, to the point of being a Welsh nationalist, not a popular role in Great Britain.”

Forging an identity in an ancient land

Morris was raised as a boy, but “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,” she writes in Conundrum . Morris began taking hormones in the mid-1960s and had gender confirmation surgery in Casablanca in 1972, at age 46.

In her view the world made too big of a fuss over this—she lamented her obituary would read: “Sex change author dies.” Yet it was another pioneering journey. “I haven’t gone from one sex to the other,” she told the Times of London in 2018. “I’m both.”

(Related: See how these 21 female explorers changed the world.)

The ruins of the medieval Castell Dinas Bran tower above the Dee Valley and the bustling town of Llangollen. The rugged, foreboding pinnacle was an ideal spot for a castle, but the native Welsh princes who erected it only occupied the site for a few decades.

As an explorer, an author, and most of all as a human being, Morris contained multitudes and didn’t fear contradictions. But she remained steadfastly Welsh.

“I think it was very important for Jan to be Welsh and always to define herself as such,” says author Pico Iyer. Morris’ writing inspired him to envision a life as a traveling journalist. “She was our master impressionist, the greatest portraitist of place we’ll ever read: She gathered a thousand details and pieces of history and perceptions and put them together in a mosaic that caught the soul of a place,” Iyer says.

“Though such a lover of cities, she chose to live in relative isolation in the country; her Welshness allowed her to cast something of an outsider’s eye on all that London sent around the world in the days of Empire, and to feel for the oppressed, the marginal. Solitary, in her own domain, not hostage to England and its limitations, Jan’s life in Wales seemed in many ways a model of her position in the world.”

A diligent and erudite scholar known for her seminal Pax Britannica trilogy about the rise and fall of the British Empire, Morris conveyed a sense of fun in her writing. In keeping with her Welsh roots, she laughed easily and brought a lighthearted tone to much of her work. She loved language and enjoyed using words, such as “kerfuffle,” that may have caused some critics to take her work less seriously than they should have.

Another favorite word was hiraeth , Welsh for an ineffable longing. In the end, Jan’s world was all about kindness and kinship, and she fostered a community of open-hearted travelers.

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own,” she writes in her elegiac book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere . “They share with each other… the common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented … they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. … They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.”

Capturing the magic of her homeland

This concept of exile is deeply rooted in Morris’ experience of Wales. It’s not just what her chosen country transmitted to her, but what she projected onto the place. Morris often said that she couldn’t make a sharp distinction between fact and fiction: While her reporting was rigorously accurate and thorough, her writing was typically a synthesis of her imagination and her experience.

Llanddwyn Island sits of the southwest coast of Anglesey in North Wales. To reach it, you must cross a spit of sand at low tide or take a boat.

“It is a different thing for [my son] Twm,” who grew up in Wales, Morris told the Guardian , last year. “I don’t have his instinct for Welshness. With him it is more basic, it comes out of the soil.”

In her 1984 book, The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country , Morris writes that the Welsh “never altogether abandoned their perennial vision of a golden age, an age at once lost and still to come—a vision of another country almost, somewhere beyond time.”

( Related: Why does Wales have the most castles of any country in Europe? )

At her 90th birthday party in 2016, Morris said that although her travels have taken her to many exotic locations, her corner of Wales has been her “chief delight,” recalls Paul Clements, author of Jan Morris: Around the World in Eighty Years , a collection of tributes by noted authors. “What I have done for Wales,” Morris said at her party, “is infinitesimal compared to what Wales has done for me.”

When I interviewed Morris for my book, A Sense of Place , she noted that for centuries Anglo civilization has been “pressing on Wales, and yet the little country seems to have survived and kept its soul and spirit. I like the nature of the Welsh civilization, which is basically very kind; it’s not very ambitious or thrusting. It’s based upon things like poetry and music, which are still very deeply rooted in this culture.”

Trefan Morys, the home Morris shared with her lifelong partner Elizabeth Tuckniss Morris, who survives her, sits just above the River Dwyfor. A year from now her ashes will be spread on an island in this stream, said Morris’s son, Twm Morys, the renowned Welsh poet and author. The islet is called Ynys Llyn Allt y Widdan, which means the “Island of the Pool of the Slope of the Sorceress.”

How fitting. For Jan Morris was, in a way, the sorceress of Wales. She conjured a sympathetic and uplifting vision of her beloved adopted country, and through eloquence and determination transmuted it into her personal reality. Through a lens of generosity and imagination, Morris saw Wales as no one has before, and the world is richer for it.

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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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For Jan Morris, Staying in One Place Was Never an Option

A new biography examines what made the prolific travel writer and transgender figure so driven, and who was ignored along the way.

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By Alexandra Jacobs

JAN MORRIS: Life From Both Sides: A Biography , by Paul Clements

The travel writer and historian Jan Morris hated being pigeonholed. Indeed, she bristled mightily at being called a travel writer at all, finding the term “demeaning” and reductive, though many of the books and articles she wrote during a plush and renown-stuffed career of seven decades were set far from her native England and the home in North Wales she made for much of adulthood with her wife, Elizabeth Tuckniss. She wrote plenty about both those places too, but Morris was no stranger to an expense account. She once called tourists “morons” in a speech, biting the hand that was feeding her at a travel magazine breakfast.

Toward the end of her long life — Morris died in 2020 at 94 — she also rejected the idea that she had transitioned in a linear way from male to female, despite a 1972 operation toward that explicit end in Casablanca, Morocco, which she documented two years later in the landmark memoir “ Conundrum .”

“I’m both now,” she told The Times of London in pronoun-plastic 2018. “I’ve got to be legally one sex or the other, but I’m both.” Decades earlier, she had opined that “the greatest writing is omnisexual, like Shakespeare.”

Paul Clements, a journalist and — eek! sorry! — travel writer who knew Morris for 30 years, has produced a lovely and scrupulous biography of her, subtitled, with a whiff of Joni Mitchell, “Life From Both Sides.” He absents himself entirely from the narrative, as if to counterweight his subject’s fondness for the first person, which magic-carpeted her right into the bloggy internet era, and pitches a generous tent for her ambiguities and contradictions — even her self-centeredness. It’s a book that properly situates Morris in the literary canon while also acknowledging her status as a “transgender pioneer,” another term she would have probably loathed.

As James Morris, after attending Oxford and serving in the British Army, she had already been a pioneer, as a correspondent for that same Times — then a quite fusty newspaper with a “largely sedentary editorial staff” who lunched at the gentlemen’s club Boodles and shared snuff after supper. Morris got the exclusive assignment to join the 1953 ascent of Mount Everest, recording such details as the “ubiquity of cuckoos,” before sending word of the expedition’s success through relay runners delivering a coded message, just in time for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Another career highlight: covering the war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The Manchester Guardian. In him Morris noted “a queer stiffness or jerkiness of locomotion,” and then delivered the small but powerful realization: “Eichmann was trembling.”

She was not just closely observant but astonishingly prolific. In one period she clocked 12 pages, or 3,000 words, per day, “hammering at a blue Olivetti more or less uninterruptedly,” Clements writes; even in supposed retirement — The Observer joked she had as many as Frank Sinatra — that count was only reduced to 1,000 words, about the length of this review (for which I, bleary in mere middle age, wangled a deadline extension).

Morris reviewed lots too, and pounded out essays, diaries and so many books, sometimes reissuing them in different forms, that even her agent couldn’t keep track. Tallying the grandchildren was also a challenge. Jan and Elizabeth had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy after being stung by a hornet, though Morris, who occasionally deep-tangoed with the truth, in “Conundrum” blamed “an unidentified virus.” Even before her transition, she asked not to be called “Daddy,” and parenting naturally suffered from her workaholism, though she bonded closely with one son, Twm Morys , in particular over Welsh poetry. Her surviving daughter, Suki, agrees with Germaine Greer that Elizabeth, now in a care home with dementia, “did not have a voice”; and further tells Clements of Jan’s “drip, drip, drip of unkindness … undermining everything, making me look and feel inferior and worthless.”

But any intriguing domestic snapshots in “Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides” — donkeys, vintage Rolls-Royces — are crowded out by the constantly whirling carousel of her adventures. She ranged so widely and richly that questions about a certain looseness with facts, or whether her prose style changed after transition, seem almost beside the point. Imperialism was a favorite and perhaps over-romanticized topic (“unctuous effusions,” one Middle Eastern scholar called her 1957 book on the Sultan of Oman). Morris swept through continents and centuries, calling Australia “flabby, spongy, unadventurous”; reporting on apartheid in South Africa; and — like Simone de Beauvoir and other midcentury intellectuals before her — traversing America “coast to coast.” So convincing were her dispatches that many believed the fictional titular country in “Last Letters From Hav,” her 1985 novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was real.

Though Morris wrote that her marriage was “open,” Clements keeps things strictly PG, whether out of discretion or lack of dirt. Her most passionate affair might have been an imaginary one with Lord “Jacky” Fisher of Kilverstone, an Admiral of the Fleet who was possibly first to use the expression OMG, in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill. Though she obviously longed for academic credibility, an essential drollness and self-deprecation perhaps got in the way; more than once she dismissed herself as a “flibbertigibbet,” one in a lexicon of favored “ricochet” words that included “harum-scarum” and “razzle-dazzle.”

As a cub reporter, Morris had interviewed Cary Grant and Irving Berlin, and later became a celebrity in her own right, going on “The Dick Cavett Show” and drawing the scorn of Nora Ephron in Esquire. Some thought her prose ran toward the purple (“the finest descriptive writer in our time, of the watercolor kind,” sideswiped Dame Rebecca West in these pages ), but her many admirers included Paul Theroux — though he once rather crudely compared her appearance to Tootsie’s — and Tina Brown, who commissioned Morris to profile Boy George for Vanity Fair . Long-faded glossies with names like Holiday, Venture and Horizon sent her to faraway lands and paid her handsomely, though she talked about money as “a constant worry.”

Like the finicky cat of yesteryear’s advertising who shared her name, Morris had strong likes and dislikes, enumerated here with savor. Yes to: maps, marmalade, music (she also favored the adjectives “melancholy,” “myriad” and “magnificent”); Elon Musk, battleships and wine. No to: complainers, Washington, D.C. (“perhaps the most ineffably boring city on the planet”), zoos and — oddly, considering how it had helped her — science. “Even evolution was suspect to her,” Clements writes, one of the few moments in a very full telling when I wanted to know more.

This biography is a boon companion to Morris’s sprawling oeuvre, even if her complex psyche, like her physicality, might be impossible to corral. Jan Morris was one woman who “had it all,” as the old Helen Gurley Brown guide so mythically proposed — but the cost to other people is left somewhere in the mist.

JAN MORRIS: Life From Both Sides: A Biography | By Paul Clements | Illustrated | 608 pp. | Scribe | $35

Alexandra Jacobs is a book critic and the author of “Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch.” More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Remembering Travel Writer And Memoirist Jan Morris

Terry Gross

Morris, who died Nov. 20, transitioned to female in 1972 when she was 46. She later reflected on gender in her memoir, Conundrum . Originally broadcast in 1989.

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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The Extraordinary Life of Jan Morris, Travel Writer and Pioneering Trans Person

In her classic travel narratives, Morris captured the essence of the world’s great cities—and the complexities of her own life.

In her masterful 2002 book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere , Jan Morris writes of how the northern Italian city always evoked in her a vague but powerful yearning. "My acquaintance with the city spans the whole of my adult life, but like my life it still gives me a waiting feeling, as if something big but unspecified is always about to happen," she writes.

A twilight book, published the year Morris turned 75, it is about the port city of the former Habsburg Empire and how the city's essence lies in its long and layered history as a generally felicitous meeting of cultures and peoples, languages and empires. But it is also a book about returning to places we knew in the past, and how travel lets us take the measure of ourselves as well as of our destinations. "The allure of lost consequence and faded power is seducing me, the passing of time, the passing of friends, the scrapping of great ships!" she writes of the city. "It is as though I have been taken, for a brief sententious glimpse, out of time to nowhere."

That description is pure Morris. So is the exclamation mark. There's nothing mournful or lugubrious here, but exuberance, vivacity, a piercing clarity of vision that characterizes all of Morris' work. I also can't help but read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere as somewhat autobiographical—an account of a city that, like Morris herself, is a palimpsest of lives, that contains multitudes and layers and does so with dignity, clarity and self-awareness.

Morris died in late November at age 94 after an extraordinary life. Born James Morris, she (then he) sang in the boys' choir at Christ Church, Oxford, served in the British Army, scaled two-thirds of Mount Everest to report on Sir Edmund Hillary's triumphant ascent to the summit in 1953, became a foreign correspondent who broke news of French involvement in the Suez crisis in 1956, wrote dozens of brilliant works of history and travel reportage—and then, after years of hormone therapy, underwent a change of sex in Casablanca in 1972, emerging as Jan.

Her 1974 autobiography, Conundrum , begins: "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." The book is notable for its matter-of-fact lucidity. "I never did think that my own conundrum was a matter either of science or of social convention," Morris wrote in a 2001 introduction to the book's reissue. "What was important was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels."

That same spirit of self-knowledge informs the works in which Morris captured the spirit of a place with a few seemingly effortless brush strokes. Deeply learned, Morris was more a student of history than a teacher—always an enthusiast, never a pedant. I particularly love the dispatches she wrote for Rolling Stone between 1974 and 1979—socio-anthropological portraits of cities. (They were collected in a 1980 volume, Destinations .)

On Johannesburg in 1976, after the start of the township riots that would years later help bring down the Apartheid regime: "There it stands ringed by its yellow mine dumps, like stacks of its own excreta, the richest city in Africa but altogether without responsibility." And Istanbul in 1978: "There can never be a fresh start in Istanbul. It is all too late. Its successive pasts are ineradicable and inescapable."

Related : 2 Transgender Travelers on Exploring the U.S. and the World, Episode 15 of Travel + Leisure's New Podcast

Morris was fascinated by what makes cities work—their geographies, the source of their wealth. " London is hard as nails, and it is opportunism that has carried this city of moneymakers so brilliantly through revolution and holocaust, blitz and slump, in and out of empire, and through countless such periods of uncertainty as seem to blunt its assurance now," she wrote in 1978. In 1976 she visited Los Angeles, stayed in the Chateau Marmont, and examined the city's celebrity industry. Of New York in 1979, Morris observed: "Analysis, I sometimes think, is the principal occupation of Manhattan—analysis of trends, analysis of options, analysis of style, analysis of statistics, analysis above all of self."

Although Morris is more often generous of spirit, her dispatch from Washington, D.C. in 1976 is cutting. "Nowhere in the world, I think, do people take themselves more seriously than they do in Washington, or seem so indifferent to other perceptions than their own," she wrote. In her visits to all three American metropolises, she was struck by their peculiar combination of global power and extreme provincialism.

In this era of Instagram stories and this pandemic season of armchair travels , I have found great pleasure in reading Morris' dispatches. They offer rich, complex pictures, not individual pixels. But it's still her Trieste book that hits me deepest. It is a vision of a city fully aware of itself and its historical obsolescence, yet that nevertheless endures. "To my mind this is an existentialist sort of place," she writes. "Its purpose is to be itself." So was Morris'. Her work lives on.

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Jan Morris, ground-breaking travel writer, dies at 94

Nov 21, 2020 • 3 min read

Welsh author Jan Morris pictured at the 1998 Hay Festival Hay on Wye Powys, Wales  Jeff Morgan 13 / Alamy Stock Photo

Jan Morris passed away on Friday morning at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl, a Welsh hospital on the the Llŷn Peninsula, at the age of 94. Born in 1926 in Somerset, her storied career started with a stint at the  Western Daily Press  in Bristol before she joined the army and served in World War II as an intelligence officer in Palestine and Trieste, Italy. After the war, Morris worked for  The Times  as a sub editor and two years later was sent on the assignment of a lifetime to cover the summit of Mt. Everest achieved by Colonel John Hunt, Tenzing Norgay, and Edmund Hillary in 1953. 

Those early experiences were the foundation of a prolific and influential career as a journalist and author. Morris covered destinations from Hong Kong to Oman, Sydney to the South Africa in dozens of magazine and newspaper features, as well as books that spanned travel, history, biography, and memoir. One of her first full-length works was  Coast to Coast,  a family travelogue of the United States at the height of its post-war glitter. Morris spent much of the 1970s writing and publishing  The Pax Britannica Trilogy, an exhaustive history of the British empire – indeed, her travels and nationality gave her a bird's eye view of the dawn of the post-colonial era. Even Morris's fiction was steeped in place, in particular  Last Letters from Hav  and  Return to Hav – a pair of short post-modern novellas that fictionalized some of her long-term observations about the Middle East and cast them through the lens of science fiction.  Last Letters  was short listed for the 1985 Booker Prize. 

Despite her success with travel writing and numerous awards, Morris often chafed at categorization , uncomfortable with the confines of genre or even the idea that she was strictly a place-based writer. In a 1989 interview with  The Paris Review  she observed, "I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature. ...I think of myself more as a belletrist, an old-fashioned word. Essayist would do; people understand that more or less. I believe my best books to be more historical than topographical."

Twenty years into her career, in 1972, Jan Morris traveled to Casablanca, Morocco for gender affirming surgery and ceased to use the male given name James personally or professionally. She published a book about her transition in 1974, noting that she had felt since she was a small child that she had been born in the wrong body. “I no longer feel isolated and unreal," she wrote. "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.” Though she was forced to legally divorce her wife upon returning from Morocco – same-sex partnerships not being legal in the UK at the time – Morris and her wife Elizabeth were able to obtain a civil union in 2008. Their marriage lasted the rest of Morris's life, and spanned 71 years.

Morris never retired from writing; she published her final book, Thinking Again , in March of 2020. It collects a series of daily diary entries penned between 2018 and 2019, which range from personal reminiscences to reflections on Welsh nationalism and current affairs like Brexit. Though she was by then sticking close to her home in Llanystumdwy, Morris's final work still conveys a deep and abiding passion for people and place and the acute observations that drew many to her oeuvre. But her legacy is broader and deeper than her writings, encompassing nationality and identity as well. She will be remembered not just as an author, but also as a pioneer for women – and particularly trans women – both in travel and in publishing. Indeed, what Morris once said of libraries could well be said of her life – "Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.”

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Jan Morris: On a Life in Travel Writing

In this extraordinary interview with New York Times journalist Don George she discusses her incredible career.

The much-loved travel writer and historian Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother, and when she is not travelling she lives with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea.

In this extraordinary interview with New York Times journalist Don George she discusses her incredible career, which has led from covering the first ascent of Mount Everest to writing the ultimate book on Venice, as well as dissecting the British empire in her trilogy Pax Britannica . Here she takes us from her days as journalist for The Times to the writing of all of those classic books, and the secrets behind her writing, such as her habit of writing each book in full three time, and her feelings of homesickness when out travelling the globe.

An appreciation of the work and life of the great historian and travel writer.

Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother. She spent the last years of her life with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest , Venice , the Pax Britannica trilogy and Conundrum .

Browse titles by Jan Morris.

Published one year on from her death, at the age of ninety-four, Jan Morris’ Allegorizings is the final despatch from one…

Venice by Jan Morris is an international bestseller, a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life and a love letter to Italy’s most iconic…

As one of Britain’s best and most-loved travel writers, Jan Morris has led an extraordinary life. Perhaps her most remarkable work…

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is a beautifully written tribute to the truly unique city of Trieste from Jan Morris, the…

The second instalment of the Pax Britannica Trilogy by Jan Morris captures the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897 and portrays the…

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• Nation & World

Jan Morris, artful travel writer who broke many boundaries, dies at 94

As a young reporter, Jan Morris was on the mountainside, at 22,000 feet, when the first expedition in history reached the top of Mount Everest. She reported on wars and revolutions around the globe, published dozens of elegant books exploring far-flung places and times and was regarded as perhaps the greatest travel writer of her time.

Yet the most remarkable journey of her life was across a private border, when she cast off her earlier identity as James Morris and became Jan Morris.

A writer of extraordinary range and productivity, and one of the world’s first well-known transgender public figures, Morris was 94 when she died Nov. 20 at a hospital in the Welsh town of Pwllheli. Her son Twm Morys announced the death in a statement but did not state the cause.

Jan Morris spent her first 45 years as James Morris, who had been a British cavalry officer, a World War II veteran and a dashing reporter renowned for international adventures and evocative writing.

“On the face of things,” a onetime colleague, David Holden, wrote in 1974, “a less likely candidate for a sex change than James Morris would have been hard to imagine. His whole career and reputation had created an aura of glamorous and successful masculinity.”

In the 1940s, James Morris lived on the Nile on the houseboat of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In 1953, never having climbed a mountain before, James joined the expedition of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay and came within 7,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s highest peak. Scrambling back down, James delivered the news that Everest had been conquered for the first time in history. The Times of London printed the story on the eve of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

“I went up an unknown,” Morris told the New York Times in 1997, “and came down the most famous journalist in the world.”

Constantly on the move, James Morris reported from Israel, Algeria, South Africa and Japan, primarily for British newspapers and magazines, published books and was praised by New York Times critic Orville Prescott as a “poet and a phrase-maker with a fine flair for the beauties of the English language.”

James Morris covered the Moscow show trial of U.S. spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers and the trial in Jerusalem of unrepentant Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann. In Cuba, James interviewed the charismatic revolutionary Che Guevara and in a 1960 dispatch published in the New York Times offered a grim assessment of what the future would hold for the country under Fidel Castro.”

“It is a strikingly immature regime – not just in age but in style and judgment too. The rulers of Havana reduce all things to simple right or wrong, East or West, in or out, yours or ours. There still is good in many of their notions, a surviving streak of idealism, a genuine quality of young inspiration. But there is little subtlety, no experience, and scarcely a jot of that prime political commodity, irony.”

In 1960, James Morris published the best-selling “Venice” (called “The World of Venice” in the United States), creating a distinctive style of travel writing, a literary dreamscape evoking past and present at once, as sensory impressions and a poignant awareness of what some called the “psychology of place” were threaded into an elegant, flowing prose.

Venice – for centuries an independent republic before it became part of Italy – “was something unique among the nations, half eastern, half western, half land, half sea, poised between Rome and Byzantium, between Christianity and Islam, one foot in Europe, the other paddling in the pearls of Asia. She . . . even had her own calendar, in which the year began on March 1st, and the days began in the evening.”

Other books followed, about New York, Britain, South America and Spain, as well as an ambitious three-volume history of the British Empire that was so authoritatively written that critics were reminded of Edward Gibbon’s monumental 18th-century chronicle of ancient Rome.

James Morris had public acclaim and a seemingly contented family life as the married father of four children – but there remained a central, inescapable fact: a misaligned gender identity, “a life distorted.”

“I was three or perhaps four years old,” Jan Morris wrote in her first book under that name, the autobiographical “Conundrum” (1974), “when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well” – sitting under the piano, while her mother played Sibelius – “and it is the earliest memory of my life.”

Before marrying Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949, James Morris explained this sense of inner conflict, telling her that “each year my every instinct seemed to become more feminine, my entombment within the male physique more terrible to me.”

James Morris began hormone treatments in 1964 and consulted with Harry Benjamin, an American physician and the author of “The Transsexual Phenomenon” (1966). In 1972, James went to Casablanca for transition surgery, choosing a doctor experienced in the procedure.

Two weeks later, Jan Morris flew back to England, where she was greeted by Elizabeth. Under British law at the time, they had to obtain a divorce because same-sex couples were not permitted to marry. Still, they continued to live together.

“To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial,” Morris wrote in “Conundrum,” which became an international best seller. “It is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous.”

Many readers admired Morris’s revelatory candor, but others were confused or hostile. In Esquire magazine, Nora Ephron disparaged “Conundrum” as “a mawkish and embarrassing book. . . . Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a 47-year-old girl.”

In any case, Morris continued with her writing life much as before, only wearing skirts, necklaces, a nimbus of graying hair and a perpetual smile.

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She completed the final volume of the British Empire trilogy and continued to wander the globe, writing for Rolling Stone and other publications. The books seem to pour out of her, often with simple titles such as “Travels,” “Journeys,” “Destinations” and “Among the Cities.”

She became almost a revered figure, considered a founder of modern travel writing, even though she resisted the title.

“The reason why I don’t regard myself as a travel writer is that the books have never tried to tell somebody what a city is like,” she told the Independent in 2001. “All I do is say how I’ve felt about it, how it impinged on my sensibility.”

Morris was often asked which city in the world, out of the hundreds she knew, was her favorite. She invariably named Manhattan and Venice, both of which she visited every year.

But she also had an abiding attachment to Trieste, a somewhat eccentric port city in northeastern Italy. Morris first saw Trieste in 1945, then returned periodically over the years before publishing in 2001 what she considered perhaps her finest travel book, “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.”

“The nostalgia that I felt here 50 years ago was, I realize now, nostalgia not for a lost Europe, but for a Europe that never was, and has yet to be,” she wrote. “But we can still hope and try, and be grateful that we are where we are, in this ever-marvelous and fateful corner of the world.”

James Humphry Morris was born Oct. 2, 1926, in Clevedon, England.

At 17, James Morris joined the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, a storied British cavalry unit, and served in Italy and the Middle East during World War II. James later worked for a news agency in Cairo, then returned to Britain to study at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1951.

After working for the Times of London for several years, James joined what was then the Manchester Guardian in 1956 as “wandering correspondent,” winning a George Polk Award for journalism in 1960. A year later, James became a freelance writer and received a master’s degree in English literature from Oxford.

It was in Oxford where James Morris made the first tentative steps toward becoming Jan, going out in public wearing dresses and makeup, years before athletes Renée Richards and Caitlyn Jenner were heralded as transgender pioneers.

In 2008, Morris and Elizabeth Tuckniss Morris were united in a civil union.

“I made my marriage vows 59 years ago and still have them,” Elizabeth Morris told Britain’s Evening Standard. “We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on.”

They settled in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, with one of their sons living next door. The couple arranged for a joint gravestone with an engraving in Welsh and English: “Here are two friends, at the end of one life.”

In addition to Elizabeth Morris and their son, Twm Morys, survivors include three other children. Another child, a daughter, died in infancy.

If anything, Jan Morris was a more productive writer than James had been. She often published two or three books a year, and more than 45 in all. Besides her accounts of travel, history and autobiography, she wrote two novels and biographical studies of Abraham Lincoln and British admiral John Fisher.

In 2018, she published “Battleship Yamato,” about an ill-fated Japanese warship that was sunk in 1945. It was believed to be one of the last books about World War II written by a veteran of the war. She continued to publish essays about her life in Wales, her memories and what she called the “tangled web” of her life until shortly before her death.

“I spent half my life traveling in foreign places,” Morris wrote in “Conundrum.” “I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately recognized that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey.”

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Acclaimed travel writer and historian Jan Morris dies at the age of 94 as tributes are paid to the transgender journalist who climbed Everest and broke news of its first ascent in 1953

• Jan Morris joined Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest ascent
• She was the first person to break the news of the successful mission in 1953
• Jan transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972 and wrote about her identity 

By Jack Newman For Mailonline

Published: 16:45 EDT, 20 November 2020 | Updated: 06:01 EDT, 21 November 2020

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Acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris, who broke the news of Everest's first ascent, has died at the age of 94.

The author, who transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972, had dozens of books published throughout her illustrious career including her famous trilogy Pax Britannica on the British Empire. 

A statement from her agent said: 'This morning at 11.40 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl near Pwllheli in Llyn, Wales, Jan Morris, author and traveller, set off on her greatest journey.

'She leaves behind her partner of seventy years, Elizabeth, and their four children.' 

Acclaimed travel writer Jan Morris, who broke the news of Everest's first ascent, has died at the age of 94

Born James Humphrey Morris in Somerset, with a Welsh father and English mother, Morris remembered questioning her gender by age four. 

She had an epiphany as she sat under her mother's piano and thought that she had 'been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.' 

In her book Conundrum, which details her ten-year transition, she recalled age three or four, that she had been 'born in the wrong body'.  

Jan joined the army in 1943 and served in the World War II in Palestine before studying English at Oxford University.

Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949 and they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys and in 1972 she completed hormone therapy with surgery. 

She was later  sent by The Times to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest mission on 1953, after she was chosen for her fitness, and was the first person to report their successful ascent, which broke on the day of the Queen's coronation.

The author transitioned from a man to a woman in 1972

She was so concerned that rival reporters would steal her scoop she used coded language for the dispatch back home, relayed through an India military radio outpost: 'Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.'

The message, once decoded, meant: 'Summit of Everest reached on 29 May by Hillary and Tenzing,' according to The Times . 

Morris, who had never climbed a mountain before, was the last surviving member of the British Everest expedition. 

The following year she travelled from ew. York to Los Angeles which resulted in her first book, Coast to Coast, in 1956. 

In the same year, for the Manchester Guardian, she helped break the news that French forces were secretly attacking Egypt during the so-called Suez Canal crisis that threatened to start a world war. 

The French and British, who also were allied against Egypt, both withdrew in embarrassment after denying the initial reports and British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned within months. In the early 1960s, she covered Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem. 

Morris, who penned more than 40 books, went on to receive praise for her immersive travel writing, with Venice and Trieste among the favored locations, and for her 'Pax Britannica' histories about the British empire, a trilogy begun as James Morris and concluded as Jan Morris.  

In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for an imagined travelogue and political thriller, 'Last Letters from Hav,' about a Mediterranean city-state that was a stopping point for the author's globe-spanning knowledge and adventures, where visitors ranged from Saint Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.

The book was reissued 21 years later as part of 'Hav,' which included a sequel by Morris and an introduction from the science fiction-fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin.

'I read it ('Hav') as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East ... viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us,' Le Guin wrote.

Morris' 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,' came out in 2019, and a second volume is scheduled for January. 'Allegorizings,' a nonfiction book of personal reflections that she wrote more than a decade ago and asked not be published in her lifetime, also will be released in 2021.

She was sent by The Times to accompany Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay on their Everest mission on 1953

For some 20 years she kept her gender feelings secret, a 'cherished' secret that became a prayer when at Oxford University she and fellow students would observe a moment of silence while worshipping at the school cathedral.

'Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: 'And please, God, let me be a girl. Amen,' Morris wrote in her memoir.

'I felt that in wishing so fervently, and so ceaselessly, to be translated into a girl's body, I was aiming only at a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation.'

To the outside world, James Morris seemed to enjoy an exemplary male life. She was 17 when she joined the British army during World War II, served as an intelligence officer in Palestine and mastered the 'military virtues of 'courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline.' In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, with whom she had five children. (One died in infancy).

But privately she felt 'dark with indecision and anxiety' and even considered suicide. She had traveled the 'long, well-beaten, expensive, and fruitless path' of psychiatrists and sexologists. She had concluded that no one in her situation had ever, 'in the whole history of psychiatry, been 'cured' by the science.'

Life as a woman changed how Morris saw the world and how the world saw Morris. She would internalize perceptions that she couldn't fix a car or lift a heavy suitcase, found herself treated as an inferior by men and a confidante by women. She learned that there is 'no aspect of existence, no moment of the day, no contact, no arrangement, no response, which is not different for men and women.'

Morris and her wife were divorced, but they remained close, and, in 2008, formalized a new bond in a civil union. They also promised to be buried together, under a stone inscribed in both Welsh and England: 'Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.' 

In 2018, Morris told The Financial Times that her transition had not changed her writing 'in the slightest'.

She also revealed how she thought of herself as 'both man and woman. Or a mixture of both'.

Morris' publisher Faber Books paid tribute to her in a statement.

'A trailblazer and an extraordinary life force, her wonderful, generous books opened up the world for so many people. We are honoured to have been her publisher for over 60 years.'

Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford also shared a message about the writer.

'Very sad to hear of the passing of Jan Morris,' he tweeted. 'Such an incredibly talented author and what an amazing life she had.

'She was a real treasure to Wales. My thoughts are with her family and friends at this time.'

Historian William Dalrymple tweeted: 'RIP the great Jan Morris- a lifelong literary inspiration and one of the funniest, liveliest and most wonderful people I've ever had the pleasure of getting to know.'  

Author Kate Mosse labelled Morris an 'extraordinary woman'.

She scooped the world when Everest was conquered, wrote sublimely of travel odysseys - and, decades after changing gender, remarried the love of her life. As she dies aged 94 RICHARD KAY reveals why Jan Morris was the boldest adventurer

To say Jan Morris lived a little is an understatement. It was she who broke the news to the world of Hillary and Tenzing's conquest of Everest, and she was the first reporter to reveal France's secretive role in what became the Suez Crisis.

As a prolific author, historian and travel writer, her books — which included Pax Britannica, a magisterial history of the British Empire — were instant bestsellers. She also enjoyed a long and happy marriage, with four children.

But this was only a fraction of the achievements of the woman whose death at the age of 94 was announced yesterday by her son Twm.

Transition: Jan, pictured in 1965

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was her transition from male to female, long before such a phrase was the accepted term and when it was more bluntly labelled a 'sex-change' operation.

In 1974 she provided an account, in her autobiography Conundrum, of the then pioneering gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca that turned her from James to Jan. But what happened afterwards was even more remarkable.

For she remained in love with the woman who had been her wife and borne her three sons and a daughter, and a fifth child who died in infancy.

Convention at the time meant they had to divorce — two women could not remain married. But such was their affection for one another, they continued to live together.

Then 12 years ago, with the liberalising of social laws, they repeated in a civil partnership ceremony the vows they had taken almost 60 years earlier.

Theirs was a union of utter devotion, as their son poignantly acknowledged in announcing Jan's death: 'This morning at 11.40 . . . the author and traveller Jan Morris began her greatest journey. She leaves behind on the shore her lifelong partner, Elizabeth.'

For years after that register office civil union, Elizabeth continued to call herself 'Mrs Morris'. They had lived under the same roof, in a cottage between the sea and the mountains in North Wales, for decades.

And as Elizabeth said after the 2008 ceremony: 'We didn't want to divorce — we loved each other very much — but we were told we had to because two women cannot be man and wife.' She added: 'It's rather nice to be legal again.'

It was an extraordinary love that enabled them to survive the emotional trauma of gender reassignment surgery and remain so contentedly both a couple and proud parents.

The depth of the relationship was illustrated movingly in Conundrum, written two years after Jan's transition.

In it, she recalls her agonising uncertainties about her gender and describes how James Morris, at the age of four, sat listening to his mother playing the piano and realised that although he was in boy's clothes, his male body was Nature's mistake.

As she wrote in Conundrum, at first it was 'cherished as a secret', the 'conviction of mistaken sex . . . no more than a blur, tucked away at the back of my mind'. But throughout childhood there was 'a yearning for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern, or some element in me that should be hard and permanent but was instead soluble and diffuse'.

Born in Somerset in 1926, Morris joined the Army in 1943, serving as an intelligence officer in Palestine before returning to read English at Oxford.

In 1949 he arrived in London to take a course in Arabic, moving into a room in a house close to Madame Tussauds.

Perhaps her greatest accomplishment was her transition from male to female, long before such a phrase was the accepted term and when it was more bluntly labelled a 'sex-change' operation

Living in the same house was Elizabeth, a tea-planter's daughter, who had just emerged from a broken engagement and was working as a secretary to Maxwell Ayrton, a leading architect.

In the misery of his sexual uncertainty, Morris felt himself in 'a remote and eerie capsule'. But after meeting Elizabeth, he found himself enjoying 'one particular love of an intensity so different from all the rest, on a plane of experience so mysterious, and of a texture so rich, that it overrode from the start all my sexual ambiguities and acted like a key to the latch of my conundrum'.

James and Elizabeth were 'so instantly, utterly, improbably and permanently attuned to one another that we might have been brother and sister.

'I would not say there were no secrets at all between us, for every human being, I think, has a right to a locked corner in the mind; but most of our thoughts were shared, and often we need not translate them into words.

'We loved each other's company so much that I often went with her to her office in Hampstead, just for the pleasure of the bus ride.'

There were, of course, occasional spats in the years when Jan was still James and they were married. Once Elizabeth threw a saucepan at him, and on a train journey to Windsor she slapped his face. But they were soulmates.

Morris describes as 'the happiest moments of my existence' arriving home from a faraway trip and meeting Elizabeth 'in the forecourt of Terminal 3 (to be) exalted again in our friendship'.

Their children were born from that same deep love. Morris wrote: 'In performing the sexual act with Elizabeth, I felt I was consummating a trust, with luck giving ourselves the incomparable gift of children; and she on her side, obeying some mystic alchemy.'

The marriage 'had no right to work, yet it worked like a dream, living testimony, one might say, to the power of . . . love in its purest sense over everything else'.

People, she said, were often baffled by its nature but it was never strange to her.

Morris hid nothing of his dilemma from Elizabeth and she fully understood the battle he was fighting inside — and that, as Morris says, 'through each year, my every instinct seemed to become more feminine'.

All this time, Morris was making his mark as a journalist.

In 1953 The Times sent him to accompany Sir Edmund Hillary on his ascent of Everest. Morris preserved his scoop by hurrying down the mountain and wiring a coded message to the news desk: 'Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement.'

The story appeared on the front page the morning Elizabeth II was crowned Queen, prompting a rival newspaper's headline on the coronation: 'All this and Everest too.'

Morris began writing the Pax Britannica trilogy as a man but by the time she finished it, she was a woman. She had begun transitioning in 1964 but had to travel to Morocco for surgery because doctors in Britain refused unless Morris and Elizabeth divorced —something that at the time the writer was not prepared to do.

Elizabeth was loyal and steadfast and family life continued much as it had before. James, now Jan, wrote brilliant travel books — her cultural history of Venice drew international attention to the rotting city — but Conundrum, although a bestseller, left friends and critics unsure.

For her part, Morris said nothing much changed, certainly not in rural Wales, and no one batted an eyelid. 'I put it down to kindness,' she said this year. 'Just that.'

Even death will not separate the couple. They have made arrangements to lie side by side by their house on the River Dwyfor.

The wording on the single headstone is already decided: 'Here are two friends at the end of one life.' 

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