There were two things that annoyed Jan Morris. One was being called a “travel writer”. True, she had written a shelf full of books about an atlas of places – Oman, Trieste, Sydney and, most famously, Mount Everest – but that was not the point. She went to these places to find out more about the people, architecture, history and art (not nature, though – she always preferred trains to trees). “Travel writing”, by contrast, conjured up Baedeker-type tourist manuals, which was not the effect she was after. The second thing that irked her was invariably being referred to as someone who had transitioned (no one was quite sure of the right term in 1972 when, at the age of 46, she underwent surgery in Casablanca – and “transvestite” as well as “transsexual” were often used). But that, she maintained crisply until her death in 2020 at the age of 94, was hardly the most interesting or important thing about her.
In fact, she had a hugely productive career in which she wrote about whatever caught her eye or took her fancy, from the World Bank to Abraham Lincoln, and made from it something intimate and vivid. It was precisely her eclecticism that earned her thousands of fans around the world. She became the beau ideal of the belle-lettrist, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles that she turned into lyrical art in newspapers and in magazines ranging from Encounter to Rolling Stone. For those who started to tire of her prolixity – she produced so many books in her lifetime that even her agent wasn’t always sure of the latest count – she became a tiresome gusher who substituted impressions for hard facts and could never resist making it all about herself.
