Conundrum

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I was kindly treated in the Army,” she remembered, “and far from making a man of me, it only made me feel more profoundly feminine at heart. For a time Jan and Elizabeth maintained separate households, Jan in Oxford and later Bath, and Elizabeth in North Wales, but the relationship never foundered. She reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and climbed Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Before that, they had raised their four children in the big manor house a little further down the lane toward Criccieth and the coast. What Jan Morris does offer, through her life and her work, is a window on the wondrous possibilities of humankind.

She also wrote many essays on travel and her life, and published a collection of her diary entries as In My Mind's Eye in 2019. Hearing interviews she recorded throughout her long life, he attempts to find out who Jan Morris really was.

But she came out, and miraculously was transformed into the real Elizabeth, and briskly helped me clear it all up beautifully. She and Elizabeth – who also features in the documentary – stayed together and, although they had to “divorce” thanks to the UK’s ban on same-sex marriage, recently marked their 60-year partnership with a civil union. Here, for example, is Morris on Everest: “In the morning it is like living, reduced to miniscule proportions, in a bowl of broken ice cubes in a sunny garden.

She detailed her transition in Conundrum (1974), her first book under her new name, and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment. Her desire to be a woman was not about wanting to have sexual relations with men, though she does rather charmingly describe the pleasures of being flirted with. I was as vague as the next child about the meaning of sex, and I assumed it to be simply another aspect of differentness.

Colour blindness prevented him from joining the navy during the second world war, so he signed for the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers and a commission as intelligence officer, celebrating his 21st birthday onboard a troop train from Egypt to Palestine. I discovered that even now, men prefer women to be less informed, less able, less talkative and certainly less self-centered than they are themselves: so I generally obliged them. Morris and her wife were divorced, but they remained close, and, in 2008, formalized a new bond in a civil union.