Jan Morris, Conundrum
‘I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized I had been born into the wrong body and should really be a girl. I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.’
In 1972 James Morris booked a return ticket to Casablanca and underwent what would now be called gender reassignment surgery. Soon afterwards Jan Morris wrote a book about what it had felt like to live – or try to live – for forty odd years with the absolute conviction that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body, and how this agony had finally been resolved. Although Morris was not the first person to undergo this operation, she was probably the best known and apparently the least likely. After Oxford, and service in Intelligence during the Second World War, James Morris became a daring foreign reporter who scooped news of the first ascent of Everest in 1953. During the 1950s and ’60s Morris also produced a succession of brilliant travel books. And Morris was married with four children – a partnership of complete trust and openness which survived to the end. How James finally became Jan is an extraordinary story, and her memoir Conundrum is a gripping and thought-provoking read.
Jan Morris, Venice
Venice is neither a guide nor a history book, but a beautifully written immersion in Venetian life, set against the background of the city’s past. Analyzing the particular temperament of Venetians, as well as the city’s waterways, its architecture, its bridges, its tourists, its curiosities, its smells, sounds, lights and colours, there is scarcely a corner of Venice that Jan Morris has not investigated and brought vividly to life.
Jan Morris first visited the city as young James Morris, during World War II. As she writes in the introduction, ‘it is Venice seen through a particular pair of eyes at a particular moment – young eyes at that, responsive above all to the stimuli of youth.’ This is an impassioned work on this magnificent but often maddening city.
