In a less than kind review of Conundrum when it came out in 1974, Germaine Greer, essaying misgivings about gender change that persist, wrote that “as Jan Morris plucks at your sleeve for a girlish heart to heart, you wonder about Elizabeth.

After other customs and laws had also evolved, the couple registered a civil partnership at Pwllheli council office in 2008. Elizabeth supported her decision, having, Morris suggests, fully come to terms with Morris’s true identity even before she had. She vowed several times to type no more, but could not give up the daily practice of writing, which produced the inspired Fifty Years of Europe (1997) and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001). 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.We sit inside for a while at the long table that dominates the kitchen, eating some sandwiches for lunch that Twm has left under tinfoil. While early reviews were mixed—largely due to confusion and prejudice concerning Morris’s transition— Conundrum has since come to be recognized as a “modern classic” ( Foxed Quarterly).

She published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had gender reassignment surgery after transitioning from male to female. Through a combination of self-confidence, determination and what Jan herself describes as her ‘insufferable ambition’, she achieved what she set out to, becoming one of the most successful journalists of her generation and then a world-famous author of books about places like Venice, Oxford, Trieste and Manhattan, which re-invented travel writing.She did formally divorce Elizabeth, and after their children had grown and left the family home, Plas Trefan, in Llanystumdwy, they moved to live together for decades as “sisters-in-law” in its converted stables, Trefan Morys. Many of us don’t need surgery, many of us need it but don’t get it, and many of us do want it very much, but do not regard it as the climax of anything—hormones, social transition, and outward appearance can all be more important. She felt liberated and excited to live the life she had always wanted, although she was also struck by the to-some-extent unexpected role that patriarchy played in her new life and identity: “The more I was treated as a woman, the more a woman I became. Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. There are many ways to be trans, to come out, to enjoy the lives and the bodies trans people can have.

Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.My work was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic, and the opportunities I was offered were almost unbounded. Her book on her alma mater Oxford– the city of dreaming spires – is at par with Evelyn Waugh’s evocation of that stone crucible of learning in his novel Brideshead Revisited. Nobody knows how many trans people there are—it depends how you count us—but a UCLA law school study from 2016 guessed over a million in the United States alone.

The tapping of the bird leads Morris into the first of a few apologies that she no longer has the eloquence she once did as an interviewee. Morris died on 20 November 2020 at Ysbyty Bryn Beryl (Bryn Beryl Hospital) in Pwllheli in North Wales, at the age of 94, survived by Elizabeth and their four children. Jan does not travel very far these days, though her trusty Honda Sport R still sits ready for action on the gravel outside. She created a glittering career, invented a writing style, chose her nationality and most famously, transitioned.Between the lead-up to surgery, the wrong-body story, and the occasional nostalgia for Empire, Morris’s memoir might now seem so dated as to provide no help for the present—except that it does, and not just for its rich style. Jan Morris being interviewed about gender reassignment on The Dick Cavett Show in 1974; two years earlier she had undergone surgery in Casablanca, changing her name from James to Jan. James Humphrey Morris came from a house not of words but of music, in Clevedon, Somerset, as the youngest of three sons of an English mother, Enid (nee Payne), a church organist, and a Welsh father, Walter Morris, an engineer by training who had never really recovered from being gassed in the first world war. Few conversations, at any time of life, are more stimulating, more spontaneous and more genuinely original than those long ridiculous talks we all have, when we are very young, late at night about the meaning of life. In 1982, Morris saw more clearly than Mrs Margaret Thatcher the sterility of the Falklands War, her imperial claim to islands 8,000 miles away from mainland Britain.