This is for the Raj historian Jan Morris, who died on 20 November 2020. Jan Morris led a full life, in fact two lives, for midway, at the age of forty-six, in 1972, James Morris changed gender. He recounted the experience of that improbable transformation in a searingly frank book Conundrum(1974). He was put to sleep as a man in a hospital room in Casablanca, and woke up as a woman. The next forty-eight years were spent as Jan Morris.

Johns, Derek (27 March 2016). "Jan Morris at 90: She has shown us the world". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 25 March 2018 . Retrieved 27 March 2018. Morris was a prolific and accomplished author and journalist who wrote dozens of books in a variety of genres and was a first-hand witness to history. As a young reporter for the Times, she accompanied a 1953 expedition to Asia led by Sir Edmund Hillary and, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, broke the news that Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to scale Mount Everest. Never, no. The sea is just over there. I wouldn’t want to be entirely in the mountains. I go down to the sea most days. I suppose the day will come when I cannot drive the Honda. Then I suppose I will have to walk it.” In Mr. Morris's case he caused none of the domestic pain present in other cases. He handled it all very decorously, by stages, and he managed his family situation well; his wife, who was and is united to him in a deeply affectionate though fairly passionless relationship and has borne him four children, understood him. She accepted that he was in a continuous state of misery because he felt his spirit should inhabit a female and not a male body. If there are any persons who objected to Mr. Morris's conducting this private matter, we must have strains of superstition running through our societies as insanitary as those that lead to the belief that women, deformed by exceptionally great age, were witches and therefore to be persecuted.While we talk, from time to time a small fluttering bird taps its beak on the window as if to gain entry. “Do you hear the bird tapping?” Morris asks. “It used to portend death didn’t it? We have it every day at different windows.” 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). Into that hiatus, while my betters I suppose were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I inserted silently every night, year after year throughout my boyhood, an appeal less graceful but no less heartfelt: ‘And please, God, let me be a girl. Amen,‘” Morris wrote in her memoir.

Propped against one wall is a photograph of the summit of Everest taken by the Indian air force who flew over the expedition as it made its last assault on the summit. Morris points out the place she climbed to at 22,000 feet. “That wasn’t a bad story was it?” Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast (1956), came out of a cross-US journey funded by a Commonwealth fellowship. After the 1956 Suez invasion, which the Times supported and Morris did not, he left for the Manchester Guardian, as it was then, alternating six months of researching books with six on the paper (hence one book dedicated to “philanthropists in Cross Street” – the paper’s Manchester HQ). 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? Jan Morris wrote more than fifty books but also constructed her life to a degree rarely seen in one individual. She created a glittering career, invented a writing style, chose her nationality and most famously, transitioned. Horatio talks to Michael Palin, travel writer Sara Wheeler, and Jan's biographer Paul Clements, and visits Jan's home in North Wales to meet her son Twm Morys. Hearing interviews she recorded throughout her long life, he attempts to find out who Jan Morris really was.NEW YORK (AP) — Jan Morris, the celebrated journalist, historian, world traveler and fiction writer who in middle age became a pioneer of the transgender movement, has died at 94.

Ten years later I had the privilege of becoming Jan’s literary agent at A. P. Watt, taking over from somebody who had left the firm. I remained in this role until I retired from full-time agenting in 2013. We stayed in touch, however, and our meetings led to my writing a short book about her, Ariel: A Literary Life of Jan Morris. She gets up from the sofa, inviting me to come and see the rest of the house. On bookcases and on desks and tables there are wooden scale models of ships from all over the world – those on the bookshelves relate to the books behind them – a sampan for books about south-east Asia and so on. On either side of the doorway are two bardic chairs awarded to Twm at Eisteddfods. On the ceiling there is the painted “eye of a poet” looking down. 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

Shopland, Norena 'A tangle in my life' from Forbidden Lives: LGBT stories from Wales, Seren Books, 2017