Although reassignment surgery was available in the UK, Morris would have been required to divorce Elizabeth, which she did not wish to do. Instead, she traveled to Morocco, where the surgery was performed by “Dr. B.” Obituary: Jan Morris, a poet of time, place and self". BBC News. 20 November 2020. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. This book is a very well-written account of some of the emotional factors which eventually led the author, by then in his forties, to submit to expensive surgery in Casablanca. As one of Britain's best and most loved travel writers, Jan Morris has led an extraordinary life. Perhaps her most remarkable work is this grippingly honest account of her ten-year transition from man to woman - its pains and joys, its frustrations and discoveries. On first publication in 1974, the book generated enormous interest and curiosity around the world, and was subsequently chosen by The Times as one of the '100 Key Books of Our Time'. Including a new introduction, this re-issue marks a return to that particular journey. 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 “Allegorizings,” a nonfiction book of personal reflections that she wrote more than a decade ago and asked not be published in her lifetime, also will be released in 2021.

One of t By favor of hormone treatment and surgery Mr. James Morris, a wellknown Journalist, and perhaps the finest descriptive writer in our time, of the watercolor kind, has become Miss Jan Morris, and what surprises me about “Conundrum,” the antobiographical book in which she gives a blow by blow account of his change of sex is that whereas I used to understand every word he wrote while I was a woman and he was a man, now that we are both women he mystifies me. 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.Michael Palin talks about the Jan Morris he met - witty, generous and inspirational, but also a challenging interviewee who used a variety of techniques to deflect difficult questions about her private life. Paul Clements suggests she 'played hide and seek with the facts'. Archive on Four considers how much she constructed and presented her whole life, with determination, guile and skill. The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man's man.

I did not know exactly where it was—in my head, in my heart, in my loins, in my dreams. Nor did I know whether to be ashamed of it, proud of it, grateful for it, resentful of it. Sometimes I thought I would be happier without it, sometimes I felt it must be essential to my being. Perhaps one day, when I grew up, I would be as solid as other people appeared to be; but perhaps I was meant always to be a creature of wisp or spindrift, loitering in this inconsequential way almost as though I were intangible. I” Conundrum is] a brilliant piece of writing—to my mind, it should be part of the established canon of great literature.” It was getting dark, and we had to go down through the icefall,” Morris tells Palin. “I was hopeless – kept getting tangled up in ropes and things.”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.” This was the trilogy about the rise and fall of the British empire, which Morris wrote over a period of 10 years, beginning in 1968. The recently discovered notebook she shows me, is full of all her – or James Morris’s – original plans and schemes for the books: a carefully handwritten catalogue of dates and events, with sections on ideologies, politics, wars, cross-referenced to every nation under British rule. “I look at something like this and I think ‘Can that really have been me?’” she says. I mean, you have to be a very good musician to be a choirboy at Oxford, to be in the intelligence service in the British army, to be the one journalist at the Times to go up Mount Everest."

I think I was probably the last journalist to ask a version of what became known as the “Jan Morris Memorial Question”, when I interviewed her a few months before she died. Did she have a sense of a before and after, I wondered, writing as a man and a woman? This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That it’s 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?” While we talk, from time to time a small fluttering bird taps its beak on the window as if to gain entry. “Do you hear the bird tapping?” Morris asks. “It used to portend death didn’t it? We have it every day at different windows.” Jan Morris wrote more than fifty books but also constructed her life to a degree rarely seen in one individual. She created a glittering career, invented a writing style, chose her nationality and most famously, transitioned. Horatio talks to Michael Palin, travel writer Sara Wheeler, and Jan's biographer Paul Clements, and visits Jan's home in North Wales to meet her son Twm Morys. Hearing interviews she recorded throughout her long life, he attempts to find out who Jan Morris really was.This is a beautiful book. I found it to be melancholic, courageous, and wise. That it's 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? Jan Morris naturalised as Welsh and wrote The Matter of Wales. Photograph: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

We sit inside for a while at the long table that dominates the kitchen, eating some sandwiches for lunch that Twm has left under tinfoil. There is an Aga, and a Welsh dresser and a low shelf on which are arranged seven pots of homemade marmalade, a different one for each day of the week, which now represent Morris’s principal vice (up until two years ago she claimed to have drunk at least a glass of wine every day since the second world war, but has lapsed a little now). The pictures are fascinating because they show Morris in the act not simply of gender reassignment but of transition out of the mainstream. As O'Rourke points out, James Morris was far from being a rebel. "Jan's upbringing was at the very heart of the British establishment, first at Oxford, then going into the Times, working in the Arab News Agency in Cairo, working as a spy in Palestine and Italy during the second World War," he says. "And succeeding so tremendously in all of those. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Certainly the best first-hand account ever written by a traveler across the boundaries of sex. That journey is perhaps the ultimate adventure for a human being, but although it has been the subject of myth and speculation since ancient times, it is an authentically modern experience...What Jan Morris does offer, through her life and her work, is a window on the wondrous possibilities of humankind.Trefan Morys is a low, 18th-century barn – stone-built, slate-roofed, topped with a weather vane and surrounded by a dense tangle of garden beneath a towering elm tree. Jan Morris has lived here, halfway up a hill in the top-left corner of Wales, with Elizabeth, once her wife, now her civil partner, for the past 30 years. Before that, they had raised their four children in the big manor house a little further down the lane toward Criccieth and the coast. Like everything about Jan Morris’s long and unique life, there is a kind of storytellers’ magic to Trefan Morys. Last week, I drove up through Snowdonia and down toward the Irish Sea, to listen to some of Morris’s myths and legends, while the last of storm Dennis rattled outside.