Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris on October 2, 1926, in Somerset, England. As she recalled in her memoir, Conundrum, “I was three or four when I realized that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.” First intimations. But she would live as a man for the next thirty-six years, mentioning her sexual confusion only to her wife Elizabeth, whom she married at twenty-two in Cairo, where she was working for the local Arab News Agency.
Morris left boarding school at the age of seventeen and served for the next five years in the 9th Queen’s Lancers, one of Britain’s best cavalry regiments. She then moved to Cairo, but soon returned to Britain, attending Oxford for two years before reentering journalism as a reporter for the Times, which assigned her, because no one else was available, to cover the Hillary and Tensing expedition to Mount Everest. At twenty-six, having never before climbed a mountain, she scaled three-quarters (twenty-two thousand feet) of Everest to report the first conquest of the mountain. It was a world scoop, and won her international renown. She went on to a distinguished career as a foreign correspondent, for both the Times and the Guardian.