Where to Start Reading: Jan Morris
By Sara Wheeler, 27 March 2026
She was the twentieth century. Who wouldn’t want to write her biography?
This month sees the publication of renowned travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler’s phenomenal biography of Jan Morris, which uncovers the complexity of this twentieth-century icon to reveal a mosaic of contradictions. To celebrate the publication, here is a guide to Jan Morris’s books, from Sara Wheeler herself.
‘Venice changed everything for me,’ wrote Jan Morris after lurching into the desolate city in 1946 on a troop train.
As only the best writers can, she transformed that inauspicious start into gold: when Venice appeared between hard covers in 1960, it dominated bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Venice blends narrative history, generously encrusted with the purple flourishes that became Morris’s trademark, with cosy domestic vignettes. At the end of 1958 the author (James then – Casablanca, and transition, was fourteen years off) and her wife Elizabeth moved with their two little boys to a palazzo with polished-wood floors on a curve of the Grand Canal; on the first vaporous winter nights, all they could hear was the slapping of water.
From a corner balcony they watched vaporetti and squat fruit barges and later in their six-month stay enjoyed a grandstand view of sumptuous ceremonials when the body of the former Patriarch of Venice, Pope Pius X, by then canonised, returned on the Grand Gondola to lie in state for a month in St Mark’s Basilica, a prolonged death in Venice.
‘‘Venice blends narrative history, generously encrusted with the purple flourishes that became Morris’s trademark, with cosy domestic vignettes.’’
In this volume – the best place to start if you are new to this protean, prolific author – Morris presents the city as a stage on which things happen.
Previous books had shown it as still life. Neighbours lower baskets from the top floors of their own palazzos in preparation for the mail (the postino yelled each name), and when someone moves house a removal truck is floated to the front door on a barge. The Morrises had their own boat, which they moored round the corner. As the months pass, ‘everything movable was filched piece by piece . . . First a bollard, then a seat, then the ropes, then the very floorboards, until at last she rode there, chained to the wall, stripped, ravaged and forlorn.’
In the pages of Venice, Morris explores the theme of crumbling empire.
‘The Venetians have never quite recovered from their loss of glory,’ she concludes, noting, ‘a wistful sense of wasted purpose and lost nobility, a suspicion of degradation, a whiff of hollow snobbery, the clang of the turnstile and the sing-song banalities of the guides, knit together with crumbling masonries, suffused in winter twilight.’
This, then, was a prelude. To follow Venice, the diligent reader might turn to the later Pax Britannica trilogy, the work Morris called, ‘the centrepiece of my life’. This 1,600-page story (Heaven’s Command, Climax of Empire and Farewell the Trumpets) charts the rise and decline of what Morris called an ‘ambiguous epic’. She conceived the whole thing as ‘the recollections of a centurion in the dying days of the Roman Empire, telling us how the Empire worked in his province’. The role of the observant centurion was one Morris played for many decades all around the mutable world.
The detail and set pieces of Farewell bring the pages alive just as they do in the first two volumes of Pax; here they reach a climax with Gallipoli. The scent of thyme and cordite, the silence, the corner of the foreign field – those pages are hard to read (‘boats full of dead men drifted away from the beach, or lay slowly tilting in the water, and a crimson stain of blood spread out to sea’). With this disaster, imperialists had second thoughts, or so Morris imagined, to some benign degree retrofitting motivation to human progress. ‘Gradually it occurred to them [the British] that . . . the very conception of one race having the right to rule another was unjust.’ She briefly wonders, ‘had it all been a colossal mistake?’
As we survey the world in 2026, we must conclude that indeed it had.
So finally, to land Morris’s oeuvre in the present, the reader should turn to three Middle East books written in the fifties and early sixties when the author was a foreign correspondent. I have always thought these volumes underrated, but the current war lends them fresh saliency. Here is Morris reporting on the first American planes to land on makeshift desert airfields, oilmen descending the rickety steps with golf bags over their shoulders.
The Market of Seleukia is a broad, geographically organised survey of the whole region; The Hashemite Kings tells the tragic story of the British-sponsored puppet monarchy (Morris knew the kings personally, and went to their weddings); Sultan in Oman recounts an extraordinary journey Morris undertook with Sultan bin Taimur inland into the heart of his little kingdom at the end of 1954.
I believe one can spot, in the pages of these three little-known books, the roots of all the horrors unfolding in the Gulf today.
‘The air of get-rich-quick to every corner’ in ‘brash and noisy’ Kuwait, according to Morris, exemplified ‘a change of values as complete and as significant as any contemporary social transition, even including the metamorphosis of Communism’ (she, of course, has witnessed the Iron Curtain crashing down on her beloved Europe in the shattered aftermath of war). She describes the eleventh ruler of the Kuwaiti sheikhdom (not yet an emir, though the same man became one upon independence in 1961) receiving a yacht, a gift of the American oil execs, with ‘a throne-room of elaborate magnificence’ and a sheep pen on the upper deck.
Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler is out now in hardback, audio and ebook.
Buy the Book
A captivating authorised biography of the legendary writer Jan Morris.
About the Author
Sara Wheeler is an award-winning and internationally bestselling travel writer and biographer and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio; like Jan Morris, she has spent half her working life on the road. Her eleven books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a contributing editor of the Literary Review.
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About the Author
Jan Morris was born in 1926 of a Welsh father and an English mother. She spent the last years of her life with her partner Elizabeth Morris in the top left-hand corner of Wales, between the mountains and the sea. Her books include Coronation Everest, Venice, the Pax Britannica trilogy and Conundrum.
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