Jan Morris: 'We're on the brink of colossal, cataclysmic change'
The Monday Interview: The writer, pioneer, and unparalleled observer of the rise and fall of nations tells John Walsh what she has learnt about dictatorships in a career spanning 60 years
Monday, 14 March 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jan-morris-were-on-the-brink-of-colossal-cataclysmic-change-2240989.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/jan-morris-were-on-the-brink-of-colossal-cataclysmic-change-2240989.html)
Age has not withered her from the days, in 1972, when she was British's first high-profile gender-reassignment case and wrote about it in the best-selling Conundrum. Technically, James Morris's marriage did not survive. But as Jan, she continued to live with the woman that James had married, and now Jan and Elizabeth are in a civil partnership. "We re-hitched ourselves purely for sentimental or aesthetic reasons," Morris explains. "In any profounder sense we'd never been un-hitched anyway, having lived together for half a century."
A very interesting interview ... Jan Morris's book Conundrum, which is really the story of how James Morris became Jan, changed my life. I read it at the age of 15 or 16 and for the first time in my life had some understanding of my own condition ...