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Jun 28, 2024 · Elizabeth Morris, who has died aged 99, was the wife of the writer Jan Morris, whom she supported and helped through gender reassignment with inner strength and quiet dignity.
- Telegraph Obituaries
Nov 20, 2020 · Elizabeth was Morris's wife before Morris transitioned - they had five children together and stayed together, later entering a civil partnership. One of their children died in infancy.
Nov 20, 2020 · She was living with her partner Elizabeth when she died at 94 and asked to be buried on a small island on the River Dwyfor behind their Gwynedd home.
- Overview
- Finding a home and kinship
- Forging an identity in an ancient land
- Capturing the magic of her homeland
With Welsh legends and landscapes as her muse, Jan Morris circled the globe—and reinvented travel writing.
Celebrated travel writer Jan Morris, who died November 20, 2020, lived and worked in the scenic Nant Gwynant valley in westernWales.
She was at ease in the world, but she was never more herself than when at home in Wales. Author and journalist Jan Morris, who died last week at 94, embraced Wales as her physical, intellectual, and spiritual foundation. “I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness,” she said.
She loved its rugged mountains, the spring-green hills where sheep grazed, even the gloomy weather, which was ideal for writing by the fireplace. In Wales, Morris saw an ancient nation that retained its indomitable essence. The endurance of identity was among her great themes.
Morris would often take visitors to lunch at a handsome, ivy-cloaked climbers’ lodge in northwest Wales. The lodge is a converted 200-year-old farmhouse called Pen-Y-Gwryd. One could say it was here, in 1953, that the first successful ascent of Mount Everest began, with Morris joining training climbs up nearby Mount Snowdon.
Morris was a 26-year-old reporter for the Times of London, the sole journalist on the British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt that was the first to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain.
Born in 1926 to a Welsh father and English mother in Somerset, England—140 miles west of London and just across Bristol Bay from Cardiff, Wales’s capital—Morris loved Wales and wanted to share it.
The Welsh name for the country is Cymru, a word rooted in “kinship.” This appealed greatly to Morris, as did the defiantly proud red dragon that commands the national flag. Despite seven centuries of domination by England, the region of northern Wales that Morris called home remains irrefutably Welsh.
The Welsh language, one of the oldest in Europe, is still spoken widely there, and national pride is so strong that visitors can be initially suspect. Yet the moment outsiders show even a hint of sympathy for the Welsh cause or appreciation of the place, they’re typically welcomed with open arms.
“I live, though, in a Wales of my own, a Wales in the mind, grand with high memories, poignant with melancholy,” Morris writes in her 2002 book, A Writer’s House in Wales, published by National Geographic. Although Morris fiercely supported Wales and all it stands for, she recognized that she had adopted her country; she wasn’t wholly of it. The weathervane gracing her home in Llanystumdwy on the Llŷn Peninsula symbolizes her dual Welsh and English ancestry: E and W mark east and west; G and D stand for gogledd and de, the Welsh words for north and south.
Morris described her small home in Trefan Morys as “a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an exemplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country.” And she opened her doors to countless travelers over the decades.
Left:
Morris was raised as a boy, but “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 writes in Conundrum. Morris began taking hormones in the mid-1960s and had gender confirmation surgery in Casablanca in 1972, at age 46.
In her view the world made too big of a fuss over this—she lamented her obituary would read: “Sex change author dies.” Yet it was another pioneering journey. “I haven’t gone from one sex to the other,” she told the Times of London in 2018. “I’m both.”
(Related: See how these 21 female explorers changed the world.)
As an explorer, an author, and most of all as a human being, Morris contained multitudes and didn’t fear contradictions. But she remained steadfastly Welsh.
“I think it was very important for Jan to be Welsh and always to define herself as such,” says author Pico Iyer. Morris’ writing inspired him to envision a life as a traveling journalist. “She was our master impressionist, the greatest portraitist of place we’ll ever read: She gathered a thousand details and pieces of history and perceptions and put them together in a mosaic that caught the soul of a place,” Iyer says.
“Though such a lover of cities, she chose to live in relative isolation in the country; her Welshness allowed her to cast something of an outsider’s eye on all that London sent around the world in the days of Empire, and to feel for the oppressed, the marginal. Solitary, in her own domain, not hostage to England and its limitations, Jan’s life in Wales seemed in many ways a model of her position in the world.”
This concept of exile is deeply rooted in Morris’ experience of Wales. It’s not just what her chosen country transmitted to her, but what she projected onto the place. Morris often said that she couldn’t make a sharp distinction between fact and fiction: While her reporting was rigorously accurate and thorough, her writing was typically a synthesis of her imagination and her experience.
“It is a different thing for [my son] Twm,” who grew up in Wales, Morris told the Guardian, last year. “I don’t have his instinct for Welshness. With him it is more basic, it comes out of the soil.”
In her 1984 book, The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country, Morris writes that the Welsh “never altogether abandoned their perennial vision of a golden age, an age at once lost and still to come—a vision of another country almost, somewhere beyond time.”
(Related: Why does Wales have the most castles of any country in Europe?)
At her 90th birthday party in 2016, Morris said that although her travels have taken her to many exotic locations, her corner of Wales has been her “chief delight,” recalls Paul Clements, author of Jan Morris: Around the World in Eighty Years, a collection of tributes by noted authors. “What I have done for Wales,” Morris said at her party, “is infinitesimal compared to what Wales has done for me.”
When I interviewed Morris for my book, A Sense of Place, she noted that for centuries Anglo civilization has been “pressing on Wales, and yet the little country seems to have survived and kept its soul and spirit. I like the nature of the Welsh civilization, which is basically very kind; it’s not very ambitious or thrusting. It’s based upon things like poetry and music, which are still very deeply rooted in this culture.”
Nov 20, 2020 · Elizabeth was Morris's wife before Morris transitioned - they had five children together and stayed together, later entering a civil partnership. One of their children died in infancy.
Nov 20, 2020 · Jan Morris, artful travel writer who broke many boundaries, dies at 94. Jan Morris at the garden outside the National Air and Space Museum in Washington in 2003. (Susan Biddle/The Washington...
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Oct 14, 2022 · Morris, compelled by law to divorce Elizabeth when changing gender, loved her enough to remarry her as soon as same-sex marriages were legalised. And Elizabeth’s point of view?
