Naturally our lives have not all been merriment—whose lives ever are? We have had our shares of sorrow. We have squabbled sometimes, although we have never let the sun go down without reconciliation. Elizabeth has had to surmount an obviously less than perfect marriage. I have had to run the gauntlet of those more interested in my gender than in my books. My dear children’s troubles, transient or tragic, have been my troubles too. Nevertheless I can selfishly say that, for myself at least, Life has been one long fascination, sprawling, peculiar and generally kind.
Has it been allegory or absolute? Time will presumably tell. In the meantime, after fifty-eight years of intricate friendship (married in 1949, nominally divorced in 1972), on the afternoon of April 14, 2008, Elizabeth and I re-formalized matters in a legal civil union. She thought it a charming but essentially trivial little ceremony, because she considered that we had never been disunited anyway. I viewed it allegorically, of course. I thought it a gesture of high romance. Also I prefer life to be rounded, if not actually symmetrical, and it seemed to me that a final pledge of fidelity before the Dwyfor Registrar would provide a harmonious conclusion to this last attempt at literature.
So with the encouragement of the Morysiad we once again sealed our relationship while the going was good, witnessed by the Rev. and Mrs. Meirion Roberts, formerly of Patagonia, and celebrating the occasion with Earl Grey tea and fruit-cake at Pwllheli.
BOOKS BY JAN MORRIS
As I Saw the U.S.A. (1956)
Sultan in Oman (11957)
The Market of Seleukia (1957)
Coronation Everest (1958)
South African Winter (1958)
The Hashemite Kings (1959)
Venice (1960)
Cities (essays; 1963)
The Outriders (political; 1963)
The Presence of Spain (1964)
Oxford (1965)
The Pax Britannica Trilogy (1968–1978)
The Great Port (for the Port of New York Authority; 1969)
Places (essays; 1972)
Conundrum (1974)
Travels (essays; 1976)
The Oxford Book of Oxford (ed.; 1978)
Destinations (essays; 1980)
The Venetian Empire (1980)
The Small Oxford Book of Wales (ed.; 1982)
A Venetian Bestiary (1982)
The Spectacle of Empire (1982)
Wales, The First Place (with Paul Wakefield; 1982)
Stones of Empire (with Simon Winchester; 1983)
The Matter of Wales (1984)
Journeys (essays; 1984)
Among the Cities (essays; 1985)
Last Letters from Hav (novel; 1985)
Scotland, The Place of Visions (with Paul Wakefield; 1986)
Manhattan ’45 (1987)
Hong Kong (1988)
Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989)
Ireland, Your Only Place (with Paul Wakefield; 1990)
Sydney (1992)
O Canada! (essays; 1992)
Locations (essays; 1992)
Travels with Virginia Woolf (ed.; 1993)
A Machynlleth Triad (with Twm Morys; 1994)
Fisher’s Face (1995)
Fifty Years of Europe (1997)
Lincoln (1999)
Our First Leader (Welsh fantasy, with Twm Morris; 2000)
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001)
The World (12003)
Contact! A Book of Encounters (2010)
Ciao, Carpaccio? (12014)
Battleship Yamato (2018)
In My Mind’s Eye (2019)
Thinking Again (2020)
Copyright © 2021 by the Estate of Jan Morris
Editor’s Foreword copyright © 2021 by Liveright Publishing Corporation
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First Edition
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