Jan Morris: A Life

Travel writer Wheeler (Glowing Still) offers a granular biography of Jan Morris, a journalist, travel writer, Welsh nationalist, and trans woman. Morris, who was born in 1926, joined the British army during WWII and served in Egypt and Palestine, where the collapse of British imperial ambitions inspired her to become what she described as “vocationally engaged in the decline of my country.” (She went on to publish Pax Britannica, a three-part history of the British Empire from 1836 to 1965). After returning to England and completing a degree at Oxford, Morris embarked on a journalism career that took her and her wife, Elizabeth, across the world, including to the first summiting of Mt. Everest in 1953 and to Cuba to interview Che Guevara in 1960. Wheeler closely analyzes Morris’s literary output, including her newspaper columns and travelogues. She also digs into Morris’s life as a trans woman, including the medical care challenges she encountered in the U.K. during her long transition process and her gender reassignment surgery in Morocco in 1972, which she documented in her memoir Conundrum. Morris died in 2020, at age 94. Wheeler provides especially illuminating details about Morris’s experience as a trans woman at a time “when ‘sex change’ was unexplored territory,” though those moments are sometimes buried under dry specifics about job changes and financial struggles. It’s a thorough and competent biography, best suited for those already familiar with Morris and her work. (Apr.)