Jan Morris Remembered as Gifted Writer, Transgender Trailblazer

Tributes are pouring in for Jan Morris, the acclaimed travel writer and pioneering transgender woman who died Friday at age 94.

Morris died in a hospital near Llanystumdwy, Wales, the village where she made her home, her son Twm Morys told The New York Times. He did not state the cause of death. But Morys, a Welsh poet, did describe his parent's death as the beginning of "her greatest journey," The Guardian reports, and the publication called this "fitting."

"As anyone knows who ever made that journey to visit her at home, or who ever opened any of her 40 books, Morris dealt in adventure," Tim Adams, who had interviewed Morris in February, wrote in The Guardian. "Having packed her life brim full of extraordinary journeys, pilgrimages and quests, she knew exactly how to conjure their contours for others."

Morris, who was one of The Advocate's Women of the Year for 2020, indeed had a prolific and distinguished career as a journalist and author of books. She chronicled the first successful conquest of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain, in 1953, embedded with the team led by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, in an exclusive report for The Times of London. She covered wars, natural disasters, the war crimes trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, and much more.

Many of her books dealt with history or travel. In the latter, she drew "literary portraits of places like Manhattan, Hong Kong, her beloved Wales (she was a dedicated Welsh nationalist), Oxford in England and Trieste in Italy," according to The New York Times. One of her more unusual works, Last Letters From Hav, depicted an imaginary city as seriously as if it were real.

In 1974's Conundrum, she told a true story that was highly personal, that of her transition. "I was three or perhaps four years old when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl," she wrote. Born James Morris, she began undergoing hormone treatment in the early 1960s, then had gender-confirmation surgery two years before the book came out.

Conundrum was published at a time when there was little visibility or understanding of transgender people. It received many positive reviews, although some critics thought it played into gender stereotypes.

Morris's wife, Elizabeth Tuckniss, supported her through the transition. They were legally required to divorce afterward, as same-sex marriage was not recognized in the U.K. or anywhere else at the time, but they remained life partners and had a civil union ceremony in 2008. Their three sons and daughter were also supportive. The couple had a fifth child, who died in infancy.

Of her transition, she told The New York Times in 2019, "I've never believed it to be quite as important as everyone made it out to be. I believe in the soul and the spirit more than the body." She sometimes complained about her identity being brought up when she wrote about unrelated topics.

To The Guardian's Adams, she said in 2020, "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... But that's all in that book I wrote, isn't it?"

No matter the attention her identity received, she truly was esteemed for her writing. "Morris made travel seem like the best way to truly be alive in one's skin," Dwight Garner wrote in a New York Times assessment of her career. In the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Reynolds called her "as witty, learned and enthusiastic a traveler as ever there was."

"Jan was just so self-contained," writer Michael Shapiro told Reynolds. "She loved places and she loved people. But I don't think she needed to have company to enjoy herself. ... Jan believed in everybody charting their own course. She certainly did. What a magnificent, indomitable life."