Jan Morris
Jan Morris, James Humphrey Morris, was born in England in 1926. As an author, she wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire which she started as a man and finished as a woman. She is also well-known for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste and New York. She has also written about Spanish history and culture.
Morris served in World War II in British Intelligence and later wrote for The Times. As The Times correspondent Morris scored a notable scoop in 1953 when accompanying the British expedition which was first to scale Mount Everest. Morris reported the success of Hillary and Tenzing in a coded message to the newspaper which, by happy coincidence (or media manipulation) was released on the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation.
In 1949 James Humphrey Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter, and he fathered five children, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. In 1972, Morris had a sex-change operation in Morocco, then adopting the name Jan, but still maintained the marriage. Morris wrote of her quest for personal identity in her book Conundrum. The sex change surgery was done by pioneer sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris first divorced his wife, Elizabeth, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They afterwards did divorce but remained together.
The highly-acclaimed Conundrum and its autobiographical follow-up Pleasures of a Tangled Life, described Miss Morris's pursuit of her true identity as a woman. She also has writtenTrieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001) and A Writer's House in Wales (2002).
On May, 14th, 2008, Jan married again her Elizabeth. The civil partnership ceremony took place nearly 60-years after the author married the woman, who was to become her life-long companion, and more than 30-years after they divorced. Her companion always knew that her then husband believed that he ought to have been born a woman and accepted the sex-change operation. Elizabeth Morris said: "We are back together again officially. After Jan had a sex change we had to divorce. So there we were. It did not make any difference to me. We still had our family. We just carried on”.
She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Wales and the University of Glamorgan and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She received the Glyndŵr Award in 1996. She accepted her CBE in the 1999 Queen's Birthday Honours out of polite respect, but is a Welsh nationalist republican at heart. In January 2008 The Times named her the 15th greatest British writer since the War.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2070830/Sex-change-author-Jan-Morris-remarries-wife-she-wed-as-a-man.html
