It is an intimidating task to write a life of Jan Morris. Not only because Morris lived a very long time – she died in 2020 aged 94 – nor because she experienced so many lifetimes worth of adventure as writer, explorer, journalist, historian, traveller, not to mention the great pioneering journey of her gender transformation. Rather, it is daunting because, of all writers, Morris was a diehard defender of the ineffable mystery of the individual spirit, of her individual spirit, almost above all other virtues (apart, famously, from the lifelong necessity to “be kind”).
In 2017 she allowed her friend and agent, Derek Johns, to write a concise “literary life” (called Ariel after the shape-shifting Shakespearean faerie), but she always resisted the idea of full-scale biography like this one, not least because she was allergic to containment, especially within the covers of a hardback book. Her half dozen volumes of “memoir” after Conundrum, the indelible 1974 account of her personal metamorphosis, were all concerned with place as much as person, flights of fancy and anecdote, that favoured observation and lightness over confession and psychology. As she told Sue Lawley, on her second appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2002, when Lawley tried to dig down into the motivation for her “sex change”: “People try to define something that is indefinable. I accepted it as it came and to pin down exactly why I did it jars with me. It’s like trying to define a piece of music by Debussy.”
