‘Jan Morris: A Life’ by Sarah Wheeler

I recently finished reading two biographies of Jan Morris (1926-2020), a writer who I very much admired and a personality that has always fascinated me.

Sarah Wheeler’s book is the shorter of the two, but is still pretty chunky at over four hundred pages. It was published a few weeks ago in recognition of the fact that Jan Morris would have turned 100 later this year. It is not ‘an official biography’ but was clearly written with a lot of cooperation from Jan Morris’s children and other family members, and involved carrying out research in the ‘library’ house its subject lived in for decades prior to her death in 2020 and that of her wife / companion, Elizabeth in 2024. Sarah Wheeler slept in her bed and writes about discovering all manner of private correspondence inside books and stuffed in boxes under the stairs. She is herself a travel writer who knew Jan Morris, and her book contains quite a lot of personal reflection, both on the person and on the process of writing about her.

It is rare that I emerge from reading a biography of someone I have admire with a less positive impression, but that was the case here. Sarah Wheeler does an admirable job of explaining all the contradictions, being honest and also very fair about the many different facets of Jan Morris’s character. The key point that is made is that she was at the same time both a highly talented, instinctive writer of huge ambition and ability, while also being a very self-centred personality who managed to appear rather kinder, more emollient and more empathetic than she really was. There was an abundance of personal charm, wit and likeability, combined with a self-deprecating way of talking about herself, which served to mask her less pleasant attributes most effectively. She was a workaholic who produced pretty consistently strong writing over decades, and that required a measure of selfishness in the way she ran her life. She was away from her family travelling a great deal of the time. But she was also also a very assiduous friend, always happy to apologise when she said something that might have offended. She was also excellent company. Hard working, proudly idiosyncratic and artistically restless.

The problem is that 400 pages is just not remotely enough in which to do full justice to both the life and the work. Sarah Wheeler largely focuses on the life in this biography, and particularly on the extraordinary journey its subject took, being born James Morris and living for over forty years as a man, before transitioning in the early 1970s and spending the remainder of her life as a woman called Jan. Inevitably the sex change aspect of Jan Morris’s life is discussed in detail, as it must be. But this biography rightly avoids letting this aspect of its subject’s life dominate the account. She herself got very bored when asked about it in interviews, always refusing to be categorised simplistically and being very happy to accept that she combined both male and female characteristics after her transition as she had previously. There never seems to have been at any time a big personal crisis associated with the process itself. It all went smoothly for her (less so for her children), and while she and Elizabeth were obliged in law to divorce after her reassignment operation was carried out in Casablanca in 1972, they continued to live together as devoted companions for the rest of their lives. Her body changed, as did her name and pronouns, but in all other respects life ticked along as before in the same frenetic, high-achieving manner.

A change in sex was, of course, not the only transformation that she went through in her life. Another major one was political and cultural. She grew up in England, sometimes enjoying and sometime very much not enjoying, a privileged and traditional English education. Her writing in the first half of her life was unashamedly patriotic and most definitely British in its perspective. She wrote admiringly of many aspects of the British Empire, defending as it became increasingly unfashionable to do so. Yet she would up every inch the Welsh nationalist and a republican to boot, yearning for a time in which Wales could achieve that status of a separate state within a big United States of Europe.

There was also terrific social mobility. She grew up in Clivedon in a very ordinary kind of lower middle class family. Her mother taught music and played church organs, while her father (who died when she was 12) drove taxis and funeral cars. He (as James) and his brothers all went to first rate boarding schools thanks to scholarships. He went on through writing to be highly successful financially, buying some big houses and driving a veritable fleet of vintage cars, always travelling at his / her own expense when on assignment and always staying in fairly swish hotels.

Another point that is stressed here is that Jan Morris always tried hard not to take anything remotely approaching an academic approach to her work. Her approach to her writing – be it biography, history, memoir, novels, travel books or essays on the many places she visited – was instinctive and not intellectual. She wanted to tell her readers what she thought and felt. It was the personal response that she gave us, not objective analysis. She wrote sentimentally and romantically. And this of course is what made her so successful.

Jan Morris’s life was packed with interest. She seemed to be everywhere that you might want to be at the right time during the second half of the twentieth century, from Palestine immediately after the Second World War, to (famously) the successful attempt to climb Everest in 1953, Cyprus and Egypt at crucial moments in the 1950s, the Treason trial in South Africa, the Gary Powers trial in Moscow, the Eichman trial in Israel, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Hong Kong handover in 1997. She also met an astonishing range of well known people including Irving Berlin, Harry S Truman, Che Guevara, Walt Disney, and Queen Elizabeth. She was close friends with all the other major travel writers of her time too, some of whom influenced her and many who were influenced by her. And yet she was not, apparently, a particularly sociable person by nature, being more introverted than people thought she was.

This book, of course, makes much mention of her books. But largely in terms of sales and communication about them with her publishers. The work itself is not so much examined, nor the immense amount of reading she must have done by way of preparation. You do not get such a sense of her working methods or how exactly she managed to turn out some 3000 words of very well-crafted prose each day. I yearned to know more about the thousands of books in her personal library and the authors that influenced her style of writing. These are mentioned, but for me less so than I would have liked. For information about this, I guess I am going to have to turn to other sources.

This biography is though, in all other respects, outstanding. It is a balanced, thoughtful and very persuasive character study focused on an extraordinarily interesting human being in whose posthumous company it is a delight to spend time.