Jan Morris (born James Humphrey
Morris, 2 October 1926) is a Welsh historian, author and travel writer.
She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–78), a
history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably
Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City.Morris was born
in Somerset, England of an English mother and Welsh father. As
she recalled in her memoir, Conundrum, “I was three or four when I
realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be
a girl.” First intimations. But he would live as a man for the next
thirty-six years, mentioning his sexual confusion only to his wife
Elizabeth, whom he married at twenty-two in Cairo, where he was working
for the local Arab News Agency.
Morris was educated at Lancing
College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, and considers herself
Welsh.
Morris left boarding school at the
age of seventeen and served for the next five years in the 9th Queen’s
Lancers, one of Britain’s best cavalry regiments. He then moved to
Cairo, but soon returned to Britain, attending Oxford for two years
before reentering journalism as a reporter for the Times, which
assigned him, because no one else was available, to cover the Hillary
and Tensing expedition to Mount Everest.
At twenty-six, having never before
climbed a mountain, he scaled three-quarters (twenty-two thousand feet)
of Everest to report the first conquest of the mountain. It was a world
scoop, and won him international renown. He went on to a distinguished
career as a foreign correspondent, for both the Times and the Guardian.
In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth
Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter; they had five children
together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their
children died in infancy.
In 1956, he was awarded a
Commonwealth Fellowship, which allowed him to travel through America
for a year and resulted in his first book: As I Saw the U.S.A. A
similar book was published to great acclaim in 1960, The World of
Venice, the product of a year’s sabbatical in that city with his
family. Morris ended his career as a full-time journalist in 1961, in
part because of a newspaper policy that prevented him from expanding
his journalistic assignments into books. He went on to publish numerous
books, including The Road to Huddersfield: A Journey to Five Continents
(1963), The Presence of Spain (1965), and the Pax Britannica trilogy.
In 1964,
there was another
change, personal rather than
professional: Morris started taking hormone pills to begin his
transformation
into a female. The
process
was completed in 1972, when he traveled to
Casablanca
for the definitive operation performed by surgeon Georges Burou,
because
doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and
Tuckniss
divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time.
Divorce
necessarily followed
the sex change (it is required
by British law), although Morris still lives with his former wife,
currently in
a house in North Wales called Trefan Morys. On 14 May
2008 they were
legally reunited when they formally
entered into a civil partnership.
At
seventy-one, Jan looks
remarkably youthful, perhaps a
result of the hormone pills. And she still travels, this summer to Hong
Kong to
cover the transfer of power from Britain to China. The interview was
begun in
1989 under the auspices of the 92nd Street Y, at Hunter College in New
York
City, and continued through telephone calls and letters.
Jan
Morris publishes in 1974 “Conundrum,” a personal
account of
her transition.
Jan
Morris (Wikipedia)
Interview
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