Jan Morris’s ‘national treasure’ status is misleading

Almost two years after the death of Jan Morris, the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition, her first post-humous biography has arrived. (I follow Paul Clements in using the feminine pronoun throughout.) It is lively and well written, but it’s not the finished product. It lacks access to the private papers of its subject and her wife Elizabeth. That extra layer of insight into a fascinating but elusive personality must doubtless await the authorised life by Sara Wheeler.

In the meantime, Clements deserves plaudits. He has worked his personal knowledge and existing sources well. We learn more than before about Morris’s modest if comfortable upbringing, with Welshness on the paternal side; education at Lancing and Christ Church, Oxford; a character-building spell at Sandhurst; and about her talented, musical brothers. One of them played the flute at Elizabeth II’s coronation – the event neatly heralded by the conquest of Everest, which Morris announced to the world in a coded message dispatched down the mountain via a Sherpa.

By then she was prospering in journalism, initially at the Times, and subsequently, when not allowed to combine reporting with writing books, at the Guardian, when a major scoop about western collusion over Suez helped change the course of British history – or so Clements ambitiously claims. Both outlets allowed her to travel to distant parts of the retreating British Empire. At this remove, her book on Oman somehow sounds more engaging than some of her later effusive offerings on bustling cities and countries. She managed to annoy the sultan by referring to the remnants of slavery. Her desert sorties also antagonised the old-school explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who dismissed her work as ‘chatty rubbish’, and led to one of the few personal feuds engaged in by someone who made kindness a life principle.