Jan Morris

Jan Morris CBE, FRSL (born James Humphry Morris; 2 October 1926 – 20 November 2020) was a Welsh travel writer and historian. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.

Quotes

• I resist the idea that travel writing has got to be factual. I believe in its imaginative qualities and its potential as art and literature. I must say that my campaign, which I've been waging for ages now, has borne some fruit because intelligent bookshops nowadays do have a stack called something like travel literature. But what word does one use?
  • On resisting the title of travel writer in "Jan Morris, The Art of the Essay No. 2" The Paris Review (Summer 1997).

• To begin with, I did think so. I seemed to fear in myself more of a compassion towards detail rather than sweep, if you understand me. It seems to me I was exploring smaller things rather than larger things. But as the years have gone by, I seem perhaps simply to have widened to be moved equally by both, if you understand me, both by macrocosm and by microcosm. And that may be, again, another symptom of the fact that I've come to terms with what I am more completely than I had some years ago.
  • On whether her writing changed about undergoing a gender transition in "British Travel Writer Jan Morris Weighs In On The 'Advantages Of Androgyny'" NPR (27 March 2018).

• But I should say I would never use the word change, as in "sex-change" for what happened to me. I did not change sex, I really absorbed one into the other. I'm a bit of each now. I freely admit it. There is obviously all of this debate about it all at the moment, but for me it was never a black and white thing. Never could be. It was a sort of instinct. A question of spirit almost. But that's all in that book I wrote, isn't it?’
  • On her gender transition in "Jan Morris: 'You're talking to someone at the very end of things'" The Guardian (1 March 2020).
  • See Gender dysphoria, Transgender, Transgender rights movement and Gender-critical feminism.

• The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.
  • On not being able to communicate or recollect certain life experiences in "Jan Morris: 'You're talking to someone at the very end of things'" The Guardian (1 March 2020).

About Jan Morris

• Dimly through the silken trammels of Jan Morris's verbiage moves the figure of Elizabeth, James Morris's wife, now Jan Morris's sister-in-law, unsatisfied as a lover, deeply versed in the anguish and ambiguities of real womankind.
  So often when husbands are trumpeting one wonders what the silent wife is really thinking. In the same way, as Jan Morris plucks at your sleeve for a girlish heart to heart, you wonder about Elizabeth. Her unbroken silence is the truest measure Of Jan Morris's enduring masculinity.
  • Germaine Greer "Man into woman? The case of Jan Morris", Evening Standard (25 April 1974), p. 21
  • From a review of Conundrum.

• In her bigoted review [Thursday] of Jan Morris's Conundrum, which gets so many facts wrong Germaine Greer describes me as a silent and anguished figure. I am not very silent, and certainly not anguished The children and I not only love Jan dearly, but are also very proud of her
  — Elizabeth Morris, co Royal Commonwealth Society, Northumberland Avenue, WC2.
  • Published as "Letters: The people whos are very proud of Jan Morris", Evening Standard (29 April 1974), p. 26

• For Jan did have a terribly conventional idea of what a woman was. In the book she delights in having doors held open for her, and she more than accepts being treated as the inferior and weaker sex, whatever her protestations that the world was changing. One gets the distinct impression that she would expect men to change a flat tyre for her.
• Deeper empathy, deeper understanding, I never saw or experienced – she was, I think, incapable of truly understanding the feelings of others, and thus appeared to care little about those feelings.
  • Mark Morris "'Once she was Jan, I never thought of her as anything other than a woman': Jan Morris remembered by her son", The Observer (29 September 2024)
  • Written by one of Jan Morris's sons.

• There was something far more confusing, though. Jan had a very specific view of what constituted a "woman". First, a woman should train to be a secretary, next get married, then have babies and finally look after the family. In other words, a completely sexist view. I was brought up knowing this was what was expected of me; I was given no alternatives. My mother was this character.
• As I grew older, I couldn't come to terms with the fact that Jan wanted to be a "woman" when her view of "women" was totally the opposite of what she was. She wasn't at all maternal; she struggled to even give her own children a hug, stiffening to a board when we tried. She couldn't cook, I never saw her clean anything and she certainly didn't want to stay at home and be with her family. She disliked the very idea of "family". The honest fact is that she didn't want to be a woman, at least not the way she saw women. And still I couldn't talk to her about it all; I just got shut down.
  What did she want to be? I believe she wanted to be someone totally different from anyone else, a woman who was the centre of attention because of her difference. She was no ordinary woman, as she believed the rest of us were.
  • Suki Morys "Jan Morris was a trans pioneer — and a cruel parent", The Sunday Times (10 December 2022).
  • Suki Morys is the daughter of Jan Morris.

• [W]hat surprises me about Conundrum ... is that whereas I used to understand every word he wrote while I was a woman and he was a man, now that we are both women he mystifies me.
  • Rebecca West "Conundrum", The New York Times (14 April 1974)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Jan Morris on Wikipedia