Conundrum

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Jan Morris on her travels in 1988. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media via Getty Images Even the kindest public response at the time was bafflement. Germaine Greer was not alone in denying the validity of Morris’s female persona. Interviewers were prurient or bemused, or both; literati were spiteful –“He was a better writer than she”, spat the novelist Rebecca West, although in perspective any softening in Morris’s prose is more attributable to the era’s change of tone from public assertion to private confession, from reportage to memoir. Morris was a prolific and accomplished author and journalist who wrote dozens of books in a variety of genres and was a first-hand witness to history. As a young reporter for the Times, she accompanied a 1953 expedition to Asia led by Sir Edmund Hillary and, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, broke the news that Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay had become the first climbers to scale Mount Everest. NatGeoUK (19 July 2021). " 'Women felt at ease to write about the experience of being outside.' ". National Geographic . Retrieved 27 March 2023.

Differentness affected her childhood acutely, although she did not see this as attributable to her gender identity. A lonely child, Morris describes watching other people through a telescope, feeling left out of life in general. Despite this, she was “not unhappy,” although “habitually puzzled” by the conundrum of her gender. At one point in Conundrum, written in 1974, Morris wonders whether she might be simply ahead of her time, a premonition of gender fluidity to come. Whatever the case, she had a certainty about her “slow motion Jekyll and Hyde” that was all her own. When the transformation was complete in Casablanca, she writes “I had reached Identity” with a capital I. (Elsewhere she described it as “At-one-ment”). She pictures herself as Ariel, “a figure of fable and allegory” in pursuit of the “higher ideal that there is neither man nor woman”. Had the possibility of safe surgery not existed, she had no doubt she would “bribe barbers or abortionists, I would take a knife and do it myself, without fear, without qualms, without a second thought”. Catharine) Jan Morris [3] [4] CBE FRSL (born James Humphry Morris; 2 October 1926–20 November 2020) was a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She was known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, including Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong and New York City. She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female.Kandell, Jonathan (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, Celebrated Writer of Place and History, Is Dead at 94". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 21 November 2020 . Retrieved 21 November 2020. 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 (AS: I don't share that part of her feelings fully). I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

In her writing, while some critics for a while claimed to detect a change in tone, I don’t think there is any persuasive evidence for such a change. The sensibility, conditioned early by High Anglican Christianity and shaped by readings of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, remained a constant. Conundrum itself remains an essential book, one of the seminal books of the late twentieth century. Its importance may be considered alongside that of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. It has been a beacon whose light has stretched far and wide. Jan Morris was a pioneer not in that she took the brave step she did, but in that she was able, with her superb literary gifts, to communicate her experience so powerfully to other people, many of whom shared the distress and confusion she herself had felt. Conundrum is a modern classic. In Mr. Morris's case he caused none of the domestic pain present in other cases. He handled it all very decorously, by stages, and he managed his family situation well; his wife, who was and is united to him in a deeply affectionate though fairly passionless relationship and has borne him four children, understood him. She accepted that he was in a continuous state of misery because he felt his spirit should inhabit a female and not a male body. If there are any persons who objected to Mr. Morris's conducting this private matter, we must have strains of superstition running through our societies as insanitary as those that lead to the belief that women, deformed by exceptionally great age, were witches and therefore to be persecuted.a b "Travel writer and journalist Jan Morris dies at 94". BBC News. 20 November 2020. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 20 November 2020.

Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) The Pax Britannica trilogy demands the adjective “magisterial” more readily than just about any other series of books I can think of. It begins with the birth of Victorian ambition and ends with the death of Churchill. Written with all Morris’s characteristic brio it is a compulsive exploration of patriotism, of manly endeavour, which ends in elegiac retreat and submission. Morris began the books as James and ended them as Jan; I wonder if that trajectory of tone in her history reflected that great change in her own life?a b c Lea, Richard (20 November 2020). "Jan Morris, historian, travel writer and trans pioneer, dies aged 94". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 20 November 2020 . Retrieved 20 November 2020.

Leo Lerman (Summer 1997). "Jan Morris, The Art of the Essay No. 2". The Paris Review. Summer 1997 (143). Orthodox Greeks, after a few generations of Venetian Catholic rule, frequently welcomed the arrival of the Muslim Turks – who, if they had unappealing weaknesses for mass slaughter, arson and disembowelment, at least did not despise their subjects as bumpkin schismatics.”

A very good writer telling a profoundly poetic story…In fact, it is the author’s extreme subjectivity that makes the book as good as it is…After reading this most charming of all Cinderella stories, one feels that sex is just as much a conundrum as ever, which is to say, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, ‘a riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun,’ or ‘a problem admitting of no satisfactory solution.’” But privately she felt “dark with indecision and anxiety” and even considered suicide. She had traveled the “long, well-beaten, expensive, and fruitless path” of psychiatrists and sexologists. She had concluded that no one in her situation had ever, “in the whole history of psychiatry, been ‘cured’ by the science.” a b McSmith, Andy (4 June 2008). "Love story: Jan Morris – Divorce, the death of a child and a sex change... but still together". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2 July 2008 . Retrieved 12 March 2010.