Traveling Genius

Traveling Genius surveys the half century of work by British writer Jan Morris, including more than fifty books and thousands of essays and reviews, from 1950s America via Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Sydney, and Hong Kong to her home in Wales. Internationally known as a travel writer, she has also distinguished herself across many other genres by writing history, autobiographies and biographies, and literary fiction and essays. Existing accounts of Morriss work are largely confined to reviews and magazine essays, and often concentrate on James Morriss sex change and transformation into Jan Morris. This is of course significant to the writing, and some critics detect a change of tone and style afterward, but a detailed analysis of how her writing works has not yet been undertaken. Fenwick fills that gap in the scholarship with the first study to explore the depths of Morriss complete body of work.