Piers Brendon at Literary Review:
The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predicted that the valedictory headlines would read ‘Sex Change Author Dies’. As James Morris, he had won early fame as the Times reporter who broke the news of the conquest of Everest on Coronation Day, 1953. And Morris’s real distinction, as Sara Wheeler affirms, was as a travel writer. It was a term she loathed. (Wheeler follows Morris’s own lead in using male pronouns for the author’s early life and female ones after 1970, when transition was nearing completion.) But as a young man James had immersed himself in Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta and Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, and went on to evoke the character of places far and near in vivid prose, turning each odyssey into a personal adventure. Sometimes, it is true, Morris indulged in narcissism and euphuism: slam shut his book about Oxford, said Dennis Potter, and ‘the purple ought to ooze out like the juice of squashed plums’. Yet Morris was, Wheeler plausibly maintains, ‘among the finest descriptive writers who ever lived’.
more here.
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