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We are sad to learn of the death of the writer Jan Morris OL (Sanderson’s 1941-44) at the age of 94. We are proud to count her amongst Lancing’s alumni.
Born James Morris, he was part of the wartime generation for whom the school was based in Ludlow. After Lancing, time as an intelligence officer in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers preceded a degree in English at Christ Church, Oxford. An illustrious early career as a journalist followed, including breaking the story of the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, scooping the rest of the world’s press in the process. Coast to Coast, which traced a journey across the United States, was the first of many acclaimed works of travel and social history, perhaps most notable of which were ‘biographies’ of Venice, Oxford, and Trieste.
James transitioned to a female identity in the 1960s, and had what was then pioneering gender reassignment surgery in 1972, becoming Jan Morris. Her remarkable account of this journey of identity, Conundrum, was chosen by The Times as one of the ‘100 key books of our time’. Prolific and successful at writing across genres, she wrote numerous further books, including memoirs, meditations on landscape, biography, a trilogy examining the British Empire, and a Booker Prize shortlisted novel. Her last work, a collection of her diaries titled Think Again, was published as recently as March this year and was described in the Guardian as ‘a beguilingly supple narrative, able to absorb all the contradictions and revisions that mark a long, well-remembered life.’
Jan leaves Elizabeth, her wife and partner since 1949, and their children.