A compassionate and comprehensive biography ... Ms. Wheeler, herself a travel writer, knew and admired Morris, but she pins the biographical butterfly firmly in place.
Moving ... Wheeler’s biography is vivid, comprehensive, a bit fluky and very British ... The tone can be glib ('King Farouk, still an ass …'). Her garrulous interjections don’t always land. Yet being a bit fluky is better than being dull, which this biography is not ... Captures Morris’s multiple and overlapping contradictions ... Wheeler never quite gets to the bottom of Morris’s sex life, a topic Morris mostly avoided in print ... I wish this biography suggested more of the hassles and anxieties that routinely accompany travel.
Like a skilful family therapist, Wheeler makes space for all this complication, mostly without judgment, though judgments of one’s own are hard to resist ... This is a sensitive, beautifully written, and masterly biography; a huge portrait whose perspective occasionally leaves Morris looking rather small.
Jan Morris: A Life has all the momentum of Morris herself, more than keeping up with her breathless pace of travelling and writing, flirting and persuasion, questing and discarding, all her changeability. If I have a criticism, it is only an occasional awkwardness of Wheeler’s phrasing ... Otherwise, this account is acutely sensitive – a deep investigation conducted with great lightness of touch, quick-moving and enjoyably worthy of the best of Morris’s writing itself.
Sara Wheeler is the perfect choice to write this biography ... She is as fierce and flinty as her subject and writes with Morrisian verve and acuity ... Brave, beautifully written and shrewdly researched, this is a riveting read by a writer at the top of her game.
Wheeler draws on interviews and abundant archival sources to offer a balanced portrait of historian, memoirist, and intrepid travel writer Jan Morris ... A sensitive, empathetic, and measured biography.
A granular biography ... Wheeler provides especially illuminating details about Morris’s experience as a trans woman at a time 'when ‘sex change’ was unexplored territory' ... It’s a thorough and competent biography, best suited for those already familiar with Morris and her work
