Jan Morris, the Celebrated Travel Writer Who Elegantly Chronicled Her Own Journey of Transition, Dies at 94

Though a trailblazer, Morris was not one to dwell too deeply on the significant role she played in the history of LGBTQ rights.

As The New York Times noted in 2019, when her last book of essays, In My Mind’s Eye, was serialized on BBC Radio, giving her another jolt of late-in-life fame, Morris had always been impatient with reporters’ questions about transgender politics, “possibly because she made peace with her own decisions so long ago.” As she told the paper of her transition, “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 made a similar point in Conundrum, writing, “To me gender is not physical at all, but is altogether insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music, it is a spring in one’s stem or an exchange of glances, it is more truly life and love than any combination of genitals, ovaries and hormones.”

In one of her last interviews, conducted in March of this year, Morris talked of her advanced age and the realization that her life was nearing its close. “I am sorry to be so indistinct,” she told a reporter for The Guardian, when briefly losing her train of thought while recounting an anecdote. “The truth is, you are talking to someone at the very end of things. I felt that first about two years ago. I felt it creeping up, and now I know I am approaching the end.” 

And while she might not have meant it to be, the final passage in her 2001 book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, could well serve as an epitaph. “As for me, when my clock moves on for the last time, the angel having returned to Heaven, the angler having packed it in for the night and gone to the pub, I shall happily haunt the two places that have most happily haunted me,” Morris wrote. “Most of the after-time I shall be wandering with my beloved along the banks of the Dwyfor; but now and then you may find me in a boat below the walls of Miramar, watching the nightingales swarm.”

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