‘Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides’ by Paul Clements

This rather longer biography of Jan Morris was published in 2022 eighteen months after her death and is more conventional in its approach than the Sarah Wheeler book. The focus here is less on the person and more on her work, which for me made it a more interesting read.

Paul Clements makes clear in his ‘after-forward’ that he has been a lifetime devotee of Jan Morris’s writing and that she had a major influence on him. He has spent decades building up a collection of various editions of her many books and is thus an unapologetic, somewhat adoring fan. He does not, therefore, here attempt anything by way of a critique either of the woman or of her output, instead continually pointing out what an extraordinary talent she had and arguing that she should be considered one of the greatest prose stylists of her generation. I concur with this view. Jan Morris was a supreme practitioner of literary non-fiction writing. She was also extraordinarily prolific, managing to publish fifty-eight books and to edit a further four, while also producing millions of words of journalism, first as a foreign correspondent on the Times and Guardian newspapers, and latterly most often in the form of book reviews.

This biography is not, however, hagiographic, because it sets out at length how every book James and later Jan Morris write was received. Not all reviewers took to her writing, particularly in her later years. Many were sniffy and dismissive at times, and their views are given plenty of space here alongside those of the more favourable reviewers of her work.

Jan Morris was a very genial personality who gave a great many extensive interviews to journalists and profile-writers. Paul Clements has tracked all of these down, as well as the texts of speeches she gave at literary festivals and when accepting the many awards that she received.

Her range was extraordinary, comprising history, biography, novels, personal diaries, memoirs, general essays as well has the ‘travel literature’ that she was principally known and celebrated for. She did not, herself, like to be categorised and disliked the term ‘travel writer’ when applied to her on the very reasonable grounds that it was places she wrote about and not the journeys she made to get to them. The quality of what she wrote, however, over a seventy-six year publishing career stayed remarkably high, even when she was in her nineties.

This is a very extensive, very well-researched and well-crafted biography - more about the public figure than the private person. I thoroughly enjoyed every chapter and will now be seeking out some of the books its subject wrote that I was previously unaware even existed.