Conundrum

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Pinc List 2017". Wales Online. 19 August 2017. Archived from the original on 20 August 2017 . Retrieved 20 August 2017.

Paul Clements knew Morris for 30 years, edited a collection of tributes to her on her 80th birthday and wrote a critical study of her work in 1998. He begins this book with understandable, almost lawyerly care, piling up the grounded facts of an existence that aspired above all to airiness. This method suits the first half of Morris’s life well: the childhood at Clevedon in Somerset, third child of a hearse-driving father and a church-organ playing mother; the adolescence at Lancing College “[thrilling] to the touch of a prefect’s strong hand”; the years as a young intelligence officer in Venice and Trieste and Cairo (all places to which Morris the writer would return); and a celebrated stint as a reporter for the Times, breaking the scoop of all scoops, the news of Hillary’s conquest of Everest (Morris made it to 22,000 feet). Two of their sons wholeheartedly shared their mother’s admiration; their daughter, Suki, told Clements that the transition was never really discussed I spent half my life traveling in foreign places. I did it because I liked it, and to earn a living, and I have only lately come to see that incessant wandering as an outer expression of my inner journey. I have never doubted, though, that much of the emotional force, what the Welsh call hwyl, that men spend in sex, I sublimated in travel--perhaps even in movement itself, for I have always loved speed, wind, and great spaces [. . .] But it could not work forever [. . .] My manhood was meaningless.”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?”

Later Morris forfeited a promised job on the Observer after telling its anti-colonial editor, David Astor, that the British empire “is on the whole a force for good in the world, and ... fighting a rearguard action is the right and honourable thing to do”. He was anyway an outrageously successful journalist, moving with his family to live in the French Alps, flush with flash magazine commissions (a single piece – not one for the Guardian – paid for a car) and contracts for more books, including Sultan in Oman (1957) and The Hashemite Kings (1959). 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.” One of the first-ever books on gender transition, this poignant memoir by a trans woman is “the best first-hand account ever written by a traveler across the boundaries of sex” ( Newsweek). Leo Lerman (Summer 1997). "Jan Morris, The Art of the Essay No. 2". The Paris Review. Summer 1997 (143).People tend to be either big fans or else they've never heard of her," says John O'Rourke, a Dublin-born film-maker who has produced and directed a new documentary about the travel writer Jan Morris. I try. Quite often now it is a bit too much for me. But I try to do some exercise every day, the gods insist on it.”