This post originally appeared on Vogue.
Jan Morris, who spent the first half of her life as James Morris, a journalist who found global fame chronicling Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, and then the second as a celebrated essayist and one of the most famous transgender women in the world, died Friday at the age of 94.
No matter what topic Morris covered over the course of her nearly eight-decade career—from travel to history to her own transition—she did so with insight, elegance and unflinching honesty. As one reviewer wrote when her landmark memoir, Conundrum, was reissued in 2006 with a new introduction by Morris, “Conundrum remains an exquisite read — a rare gift of empathic insight into an experience which most of us will never have but which is strewn with elements of the struggle for belonging, acceptance, and authenticity that most of us face daily in one form or another.”
Her death was confirmed by her son, Twm Morys, who said his mother died in a hospital near the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, where she lived. He did not name the cause.
Over the course of her career, Morris published more than 30 books, their subjects ranging from a coast-to-coast journey across the United States in the 1950s to a celebrated “biography” of Venice that remains one of the most-read books about that storied city. Among Morris’s most notable achievements was the three-volume Pax Britannica, which chronicled the history of the British empire from the earliest days of the East India Company to the disruptive post-colonial years of the 1960s. In 1968, The Times Literary Supplement described Pax Britannica as “a tour de force, offering a vast amount of information and description, with a style full of sensuality.” And in the The New York Times Book Review, the British biographer Philip Magnus called it “a successful portrayal of what the Empire looked and felt like in a variety of places at the end of the 19th Century — how it ticked, who pulled the strings, and the practical ends and ideals it served.”
Morris wrote the first two volumes as James and the last as Jan. In 1997, she was asked by an interviewer for The Paris Review whether the change of genders altered in any way her perspective on history.
“I truly don’t think at all, really,” she responded. “I’ve reread the books myself with this in mind. I don’t think there is a great deal of difference. It was a purely intellectual or aesthetic, artistic approach to a fairly remote subject. It wasn’t anything, I don’t think, that could be affected much by my own personal affairs . . . less than other things I’ve written.”
Another two dozen books came after Morris’s transition. Besides Conundrum, originally published in 1974, they included Destinations (1980), a collection of travel essays; the novel Last Letters From Hav (1985), which was a finalist for the Booker Prize; and Fisher’s Face, or, Getting to Know the Admiral (1995), a biography of the British naval reformer John Arbuthnot Fisher. Her last book, a collection of essays titled Thinking Again, was published in 2019.
Before all that was Hillary’s headline-making ascent of Mt. Everest when Morris was a young correspondent for The Times of London. It is hard to overstate the impact Hillary’s conquest—and thus Morris’s journalistic scoop—had on the newspaper-reading world back in 1953. The Times had secured the exclusive rights to cover the Everest expedition, which was led by Sir Edmund Hillary, a New Zealand explorer, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa guide from Nepal, and picked Morris to cover that journey. As The New York Times later wrote, “Filing dispatches by using guides as relays between the expedition’s overnight camps and the city of Kathmandu in Nepal, [Morris] wrote of deep snow dragging at the explorers’ feet, sweat trickling down their backs, their faces burning from cold, ice and wind.” Morris would later describe the event as one of the high points of her career. “I think for sheer exuberance the best day of my life was my last on Everest,” she wrote in Conundrum. “The mountain had been climbed, and I had already begun my race down the glacier toward Katmandu, leaving the expedition to pack its gear behind me.”
