Charleston County Public Library

Conundrum, Jan Morris

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Conundrum

61240624

Jan Morris

New York Review Books classics

The great travel writer Jan Morris was born James Morris. James Morris distinguished himself in the British military, became a successful and physically daring reporter, climbed mountains, crossed deserts, and established a reputation as a historian of the British empire. He was happily married, with several children. To all appearances, he was not only a man, but a man's man. Except that appearances, as James Morris had known from early childhood, can be deeply misleading. James Morris had known all his conscious life that at heart he was a woman. "Conundrum, "one of the earliest books to discuss transsexuality with honesty and without prurience, tells the story of James Morris's hidden life and how he decided to bring it into the open, as he resolved first on a hormone treatment and, second, on risky experimental surgery that would turn him into the woman that he truly was

Introduction -- 1. (Under the piano ; Above the sea ; Trans-sexuality ; My conundrum) -- 2. (Living a falsehood ; The nest of singing birds ; On Oxford ; A small lump ; In the cathedral ; Laughing) -- 3. (Sex and my conundrum ; In the hayloft ; Gender and Bolsover, Ma.) -- 4. (The colonel's greeting ; As to soldiering ; Impostor in the mess ; Otto ; Non-persons) -- 5. (Identity ; Precedents of sorts ; Dr. Benjamin ; 'To alter the body!') -- 6. ('Zero!') -- 7. (Rescued ; A grand love ; Objets d'art ; The nightingale) -- 8. (Three employers ; 'Anybody from the Guardian' ; Half a column ; Among the Egyptians ; Abhorrence) -- 9. (To Everest ; The male brilliance ; The male rhythm ; A holy man) -- 10. (A trace of paranoia? ; A bad world ; No place for me)11. (Pleasing my senses ; The lust of Venice ; The solace of Africa ; Sublimations) -- 12. (Changing sex ; Hormonal effects ; A precarious condition ; Self-protection ; Rules) -- 13. (Oxford again ; Logistics ; Jan ; 'Come on in!' ) -- 14. (Concerning surgery) -- 15. (Trefan ; The last summer ; On Welshness) -- 16. (Casablanca ; In the clinic ; A stunning thought ; Made normal ; Comrades! ; New out of Africa) -- 17. (All for fun? ; A manner suited ; Views of life ; Female sensations ; Forgetting) -- 18. (Problems still ; Ask a silly question ; 'One is baffled' ; Regrets?) -- 19. (The human condition ; Speculaton ; Under the piano still)