Jan Morris seemed to live multiple lives.
She was a soldier at the end of the Second World War, and a globetrotting journalist with a knack for turning up in the middle of what would become historic events.
She was a man — James Morris — and then a woman, undergoing gender-reassignment surgery in Casablanca at the age of forty-six.
She hated being called a travel writer but she wrote remarkable books about place, and was one of the finest descriptive writers of her time.
She also wrote celebrated histories, including the Pax Brittanica Trilogy, an elegy to the British Empire that captured the period in a kaleidoscope of incidents and characters, steeped in melancholy and a sense of decline.
The quality of her work is uneven. Money troubles led her to recycle newspaper articles into books that were often formulaic and disjointed. But the best of her work will stand among our greatest writing on place.
The life behind that work was rife with contradictions. Morris preached the virtues of kindness, but according to her children she was a terrible parent, cold and cruel.
Others have described her as a narcissist, a fabulist, and a class snob who told stories that inflated her family origins.
Who better to uncover the complexities of this twentieth-century icon than a writer who excels at both biography and travel writing?
Sara Wheeler is the author of Jan Morris: A Life.
We spoke about Jan Morris’s iconic writing style, her late-life obsession with Welsh nationalism, and the unreconcilable sense of longing at the heart of her work.
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