Conundrum

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Morris wrote many books on travel, particularly about Venice and Trieste. Her Pax Britannica trilogy, on the history of the British Empire, received praise. [37]

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 As a wandering writer – she is widely acclaimed for inventing a way of writing about cities that blends history and imaginative description and a sort of psychology of place – Morris made much of herself being an outsider. In Conundrum she wondered whether her “incessant wandering” as a journalist for the Times and the Guardian and freelance “had been an outward expression of my inner journey”. She has resisted the idea of biography, though she allowed Derek Johns, her former agent, to write her literary life, Ariel. In it he notes at one point how “it is interesting to consider that the move from male to female and the move from Englishness to Welshness were roughly concurrent”. She herself has suggested that she always favoured the “soft side” of her character more than “the hard side”, and that Wales was closer to that softness. She is reluctant to talk much about her adventure in gender, since she has said so much before. But I wonder simply if she has a sense of a before and after in the voice of her writing? Elizabeth was moved to respond to Greer, writing: “I am not very silent and certainly not anguished. The children and I not only love Jan very dearly but are very proud of her.” I felt that in wishing so fervently, and so ceaselessly, to be translated into a girl’s body, I was aiming only at a more divine condition, an inner reconciliation.”Morris, Jan (1995). Fisher's Face. London: Viking. ISBN 9780571265930. Reprinted and published (2010) by Faber & Faber {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript ( link) a b "Travel writer and journalist Jan Morris dies at 94". BBC News. 20 November 2020. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 20 November 2020. Jan Morris: She sensed she was 'at the very end of things'. What a life it was …". The Guardian. 22 November 2020 . Retrieved 23 November 2021. Catharine) Jan Morris [3] [4] CBE FRSL (born James Humphry Morris; 2 October 1926–20 November 2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.

I read it (‘Hav’) as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and East … viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us,” Le Guin wrote. This was the trilogy about the rise and fall of the British empire, which Morris wrote over a period of 10 years, beginning in 1968. The recently discovered notebook she shows me, is full of all her – or James Morris’s – original plans and schemes for the books: a carefully handwritten catalogue of dates and events, with sections on ideologies, politics, wars, cross-referenced to every nation under British rule. “I look at something like this and I think ‘Can that really have been me?’” she says. I don’t think my writing changed that much,” she says. “Except that perhaps I became a little more relaxed about it.” In her writing, while some critics for a while claimed to detect a change in tone, I don’t think there is any persuasive evidence for such a change. The sensibility, conditioned early by High Anglican Christianity and shaped by readings of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, remained a constant. Conundrum itself remains an essential book, one of the seminal books of the late twentieth century. Its importance may be considered alongside that of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. It has been a beacon whose light has stretched far and wide. Jan Morris was a pioneer not in that she took the brave step she did, but in that she was able, with her superb literary gifts, to communicate her experience so powerfully to other people, many of whom shared the distress and confusion she herself had felt. Conundrum is a modern classic.

Italie, Hillel (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, author and transgender pioneer, dies at 94". Associated Press. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. March 2015 • 6:03pm (2 March 2015). "Christopher Morris, musician – obituary". Telegraph.co.uk . Retrieved 23 November 2021. She was, in a sense, a foreign correspondent already, embedded in “an entirely male adult world.” Morris says that she was “pining for a man’s love,” though not in a directly sexual sense: Morris denied that her feelings were (her word) homosexual. Instead Conundrum insists on a more diffuse sensuality that Morris found in ritzy fast cars, in Venice, in a “caress” from a loved one of any gender, in other “tactile, olfactory, proximate delights,” prose style itself perhaps among them. Morris’s sense of “the British masculine ethos” emphasizes esprit de corps, shared devotion to a shared public goal, like statecraft or mountain climbing. Women, by contrast, keep on “doing real things, like bringing up children, painting pictures, or writing home.” At the same time as these professional and literary achievements, however, Jan was also undergoing a deep crisis of personal identity. In one of her books, Conundrum, she described how the conviction she’d had as a child that she was in the wrong body had never left her, but by her thirties she was in despair and had even considered killing herself. Conundrum describes how she succeeded in making the transition from man to woman in 1972. She said the sex change brought her the happiness she’d always sought. She also claimed that her decision had made little impact on the happiness of her four children, but that claim is put to the test in the programme.