Travels

by Jan Morris

Dust jacket design by Herb Lubalin. Eleven essays on voyages and travel. Illustrated by Nicholson Hall.

Genres: Travel

155 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Jan Morris was a British historian, author and travel writer. Morris was educated at Lancing College, West Sussex, and Christ Church, Oxford, but is Welsh by heritage and adoption. Before 1970 Morris published under her assigned birth name, "James ", and is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy, a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City, and also wrote about Wales, Spanish history, and culture.

In 1949 Jan Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. Morris and Tuckniss had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. As Morris documented in her memoir Conundrum, she began taking oestrogens to feminise her body in 1964. In 1972, she had sex reassignment surgery in Morocco. Sex reassignment surgeon Georges Burou did the surgery, since doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and later got a civil union. On May, 14th, 2008, Morris and Tuckniss remarried each other. Morris lived mostly in Wales, where her parents were from.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really good, though dated, collection of essays relating to travel, both examples of good travel writing and essays on writing itself, and the author has a wonderful delivery, and although some words sent me scrambling for the dictionary, I never felt as if she were using them to show how smart she was or how dumb I am. I really enjoyed the essays on Ibn Batuta, love of guide books, Bath (the city of), Edinburgh, and Singapore. I definitely will be trying out some of her books, and there are many. Quite prolific, in fact.