JAN MORRIS

The troubled life of a celebrated writer.

Wheeler draws on interviews and abundant archival sources to offer a balanced portrait of historian, memoirist, and intrepid travel writer Jan Morris (1926-2020)—an authorized biography that Morris’ eldest son asked Wheeler to write. Morris’ works include a three-volume history of Britain, an account of Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest, and a memoir, Conundrum, about transitioning from male to female in 1972. James Morris had been virile, handsome, and “something of an action man,” writes Wheeler, a fellow travel writer. Morris reveled in the camaraderie and structure of army life but left to pursue journalism, to which he brought an uncommon talent for analysis and observation. Writing, Wheeler asserts, became an addiction, a way to quell inner turmoil. As a writer for the Guardian and a freelance reporter, Morris became—as James and later as Jan—“the most famous journalist in the world.” Even though he knew he was essentially female, he married in 1949, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had five children. (Morris continued to use he/him pronouns when referring to her pre-transition self.) “There were three people in the marriage,” Wheeler notes, “and two of them were Elizabeth’s husband.” Meanwhile, Morris, for five years on either side of turning 40, “effectively led a double life,” with two residences and two public identities. Wheeler recounts the psychiatric and medical attitudes toward transgender people that led Morris to take experimental drugs, with sometimes harsh side effects. Finally, James had surgery in Morocco and emerged as Jan. Family life was fraught, not solely because of sexual issues. “An unapologetic egotist,” Morris was, in Wheeler’s words, a mix of “contradictions and anomalies.” For one, “She preached the virtues of kindness but after she died her daughter revealed unspeakable parental cruelty.” A trailblazing transgender figure, Morris also had Wheeler wondering this: “Why did she dress like a Walmart version of the Queen?”

A sensitive, empathetic, and measured biography.