Jan Morris: A Life, Sara Wheeler, Faber & Faber, £25

James Morris became a famous journalist when he sent reports to The Times on the 1953 Hillary-Norgay expedition that finally conquered Mount Everest. In 1964, she became Jan Morris by, first, consuming feminising drugs – she claimed 12,000 pills and 50,000 milligrams of ‘female matter’ between 1954 and 1972. Finally, she endured surgery in Morocco to complete her transition. She died aged 94 in 2020.

That alone would be enough for an astonishing life, but there was much more. Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss in 1949. They had five children, one died in infancy, and they lived together in North Wales for 50 years. Yet Morris was not pinned down by family commitments, travelling obsessively, sending to publishers and newspapers an unending cascade of books and articles from around the world.

How she did this while maintaining a large family is at least partially explained by the commitment and patience of Elizabeth. Her children were less patient. Sara Wheeler does mention in this book that, after the death of Morris, ‘her daughter revealed unspeakable cruelty’, though no details are added. Wheeler ends her story with a kind of apology about her reticence. ‘The gulf between the monster and the humane, loveable companion on and off the page is one that cannot be bridged – I only hope that I have shown… a few currents of desire, thought and energy that might connect the two.’

This book is, undoubtedly, a great, mesmeric piece of biographical writing and Wheeler’s admission of the limitations at the end is fair enough. All biographers have limitations; few go so far as to admit to them.

There were many different aspects to Morris’ travels but perhaps the most important was the British Empire. Over 14 years she constructed a trilogy entitled Pax Britannica, which she described as ‘the centrepiece of my life’. The books were an attempt to resolve the gap between her love of British culture and her awareness of the cruelty of the imposition of that culture on other nations.

Then, as time and generations passed and the UK economy slumped, it became clear that ‘people were not nostalgic for empire, they were nostalgic for a past that did not look like now’. Morris died in 2020, having seen the empire become either forgotten, despised or the subject of TV show and films.

Her opinions often seem inconsistent, but real reporters – and she was definitely one of them – need not be consistent because the world isn’t.  Morris’ life was a long inconsistency based upon her awareness, until she transitioned, that she was in the wrong body – something she said she became aware of when she was three or four. But not even transition gave her peace. She became what she wanted to be, but the world never could be reduced to an idea or an opinion and she was hungry for the world, all of it, and that made her interminably restless.

‘This is a story’, writes Wheeler, ‘about longing, travelling, and never reaching home.’

Morris’ curiosity was limitless. This seemed to stem from the dizzying activities of her own families. These were authentic 19th-century people – musicians, engineers and, in the case of her mother Enid, glorious eccentrics. Enid had studied piano at the Leipzig Konservatorium, an institution that banned female students from seeing a performance of Salome, the opera composed by Richard Strauss. Enid jumped out of her window to, somehow, get in. Later on, her reading habits – she would have seven or eight books in two or three languages on the go – would be matched by Morris’ own voracious habits when confronted with the endless exotica of her travels.

Pre-transition, she had a spell in the army. She wanted to be in the navy, but colour-blindness prevented that and she joined a cavalry regiment in the closing months of the Second World War. But the masculinity around her only confirmed her true desires. ‘Far from making a man of me it made me feel more profoundly feminine at heart…. though I much enjoyed the company of girls I certainly had no desire to sleep with them.’

After transition, she became a heroine of the culture that emerged after two world wars and the rapid decline of the empire that had so inspired her. She contacted Roberta Cowell, a racing driver and fighter pilot, who became the first known Briton to transition from female to male. There was also Christine Jorgensen – ‘A Bronx GI Who Became a Woman’, as the New York Daily News put it.

Transitioning was becoming mainstream, as, in the following decades, did many forms of sexual plurality. It was a new concept of freedom and a new world in which, in her later years, Morris became a heroine, an embodiment of liberation. She earned a biographer of the stature of Sara Wheeler.