Few writers could captivate readers, in person and on the page, so effortlessly as Jan (born James) Morris. She was blessed with an unstinting energy and buoyancy that had her dashing off postcards far and wide, answering e-mails with improvised poetry, and cold-calling younger writers to offer encouragement. Old friends might have been startled to see a handsome foreign correspondent transformed by gender-reassignment surgery in 1972 into a matron in twinset and fake pearls, but still Morris continued crisscrossing the globe well into her 80s, offering the most discerning readings of 20th-century cities we will ever have.
Some may have wondered what shadows or secrets lay beneath the exuberant charm, and that is part of what drives Sara Wheeler’s compendious and at times skeptical biography. Four years ago, a longtime admirer of Morris’s, Paul Clements, produced a workman-like survey of the travel writer’s life and oeuvre; now Wheeler comes forth with a much deeper and more questioning look at an author who could seem at home everywhere, yet remain a stranger in her own household.
