NEW YORK (AP) – Famous journalist, historian, world traveler and literary figure Jane Morris, who pioneered the transgender movement in middle age, has died at the age of 94.
Morris died in Veracruz on Friday morning, according to his literary representative, United Agents. Her agent Sophie Scard has confirmed her death. Morris’s health was deteriorating. Additional details were not immediately available.
The British author lived as James Morris until the early 1970s, when she underwent surgery at a clinic in Casablanca and changed her name to John Morris. Her best-selling memoir, Conundrum, which came out in 1974, continued her earlier work in presenting her decision as natural and independent, such as Christine Jorgensen’s “A Personal Autobiography.”
He wrote, “From now on I don’t feel different and unreal. “I can only more vividly imagine how other people feel: finally liberated by that old marriage and blinkers, I know how I feel myself.”
Morris was a famous and skilled writer and journalist who wrote dozens of books in various genres and was the first witness of history. As a young reporter for the Times, she accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary on a trip to Asia in 1953, and on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, Hillary and the Nepali Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first mountaineer to climb Mount Scale. Everest.
She was so concerned that rival journalists use coded language to send them home, as presented by India’s military radio outpost: “Ice conditions bad stop advanced base left yesterday, awaiting improvement.”
In 1956, for the Manchester Guardian, he helped break the news that French troops were secretly attacking Egypt during the so-called Suez Canal crisis, threatening to start a world war. The French and the British, who were also allies against Egypt, both denied the initial reports, then moved to embarrassment and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned within months. In the early 1960s, he covered the case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Morris went on to gain acclaim between his immersive travel writing, Venice, and places favored by Tristan, and for his “Pax Britannica” history of the British Empire, a trilogy began as James Morris and concluded as John Morris. In 1985, she was a Booker Prize finalist for a fantasy travel and political thriller film “The Last Letters of Hawaii”, about the Mediterranean city-state, a stopping place for the author’s globe-spreading knowledge and adventures, where visitors were saints. Paul and Marco Polo to Ernest Hemingway and Sigmund Freud.
The book was reprinted 21 years later as part of “How”, featuring Ursula K, Morris’ sequel and science fiction writer. Includes introduction to Le Guin.
“I read it (‘air’) as a brilliant description of the crossroads of the West and the East … seen by a woman who has really seen the world, and she lives with double the intensity of most of us,” Le Guine wrote.
Morris’s other works include “Hurstry” and the “Enjoyment of Tangled Life” essays “Cities” and “Places” and poetry collection “The World: Life and Travel 1950-2000”. A collection of diary entries, “In My Minds Eye,” came out in 2019, and the second part is scheduled for January. “Algorithms,” a nonfiction book of personal reflection that he wrote more than a decade ago and asked not to publish in his lifetime, will also be released in 2021.
James Humphrey Morris, born in Somerset with a Welsh father and an English mother, remembered Morris inquiring about her gender at the age of, when she sat under her mother’s piano thinking she was “born in the wrong body, and really be a girl.” For years she kept her feelings a secret, a “favorite” secret that became a prayer while at Oxford University she and fellow students would observe a moment of silence while worshiping in the school’s cathedral.
“In that interval, I believe that when my believers were asking for forgiveness or enlightenment, I enter peacefully every night, every year during my childhood, an appeal less entertaining but no less heartfelt: ‘And please, Lord, Let me be a girl Amen, “Morris wrote in his memoirs.
“I felt that with so much zeal and relentless desire to translate into the girl’s body, I was just looking for a more divine state, an inner reconciliation.”
In the outside world James Morris was enjoying an exemplary male life. She was 17 when she joined the British Army during World War II, served as an intelligence officer in Palestine and mastered the military virtues of “courage, dash, loyalty, self-discipline”. In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Taknis, with whom he had five children. (One died in childhood).
But in private she felt “blinded by ambiguity and discomfort” and even considered committing suicide. He traveled the “long, well-beaten, expensive and fruitful road” of psychiatrists and sexologists. She concluded that there was never anyone in her condition, “throughout the history of psychiatry, there has been no ‘cure’ by science.”
Life as a woman changed how Morris saw the world and how the world saw Morris. She would internalize the assumptions that she could not fix a car or lift a heavy suitcase, considered secondary by men and trustworthy by women. She learned that “there is no aspect of existence, no moment of the day, no contact, no arrangement, no response, which is no different for men and women.”
Morris and his wife divorced, but they remained close, and, in 2008, formalized a new bond in the civil union. He also promised to bury them together under a stone inscribed in both Welsh and English: “Here, at the end of one life, lie two friends.”
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The London report was contributed by Associated Press writer Jill Lિલl lesss Ls.
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