Jan Morris

Standard Name: Morris, Jan
Birth Name: James Humphry Morris
Indexed Name: James Morris
Styled: Jan Trefan
In the 1950s and 60s Morris was one of the most successful young British journalists, famous especially for an account of the conquest of Mount Everest. Identifying as a woman by 1972, Morris was already making a name as a travel writer, celebrating particularly the life of cities, a commentator delineating the political cross-currents of the Middle East, and a historian, especially of the British Empire. During the later phases of her career she consolidated her reputation for travel writing and also made her mark as a memoirist and experimented with fiction.
Black-and-white photo of Jan Morris speaking at a Herald literary luncheon in Sydney, Australia, 7 April 1992. Leaning on the podium, she is smiling at the audience.
Black-and-white photo of Jan Morris seated on what looks like a hotel bed, smiling.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Constance Garnett
Yet her translations created an amazing legacy. D. H. Lawrence , a friend of her husband 's, compared the couple's writing styles in these terms: Edward would rack his brain and suffer while his wife,...
Reception Jeanette Winterson
Winterson is never one to downplay her accomplishments. When asked by the Sunday Times to name the greatest living novelist writing in English, she stated: No one working in the English language now comes close...
Textual Production Gillian Clarke
GC has contributed poems to more than half a dozen journals, Welsh, English, and American, and most frequently to Poetry Wales, the New Welsh Review, and Poetry Nation Review (PNR). She has reviewed...

Timeline

1930
A Danish painter, Einar Wegener , who had always felt himself to be a woman as well as a man, travelled to Dresden for sex-change or gender reassignment surgery: removal of penis and testicles, insertion...