ABSTRACT
Jan Morris is the transcultural product of a privileged Anglo-Welsh existence and the owner of a complex legacy. While her trans memoir Conundrum (1974) continues to be part of a canon of trans women’s writing in the twentieth-century Anglophone North, her overall output underwent several transformations before her death in 2020. This included in the 1980s and 1990s an anti-imperial call for an independent Wales and then, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, an anti-nationalist transformation, symbolized by her passion for the ‘nationless’ city of Trieste as a haven for minorities and those outside the ‘normal.’ It is these post-Conundrum outputs in particular which provide the context for analysing the final writings of Morris, In My Mind’s Eye (2018), Thinking Again (2020), and Allegorizings (2021). Through this analysis, this chapter argues that Morris’ post-Conundrum writing leaves an important legacy for discussions on trans writing in relation to nation and normality, especially in relation to Wales. In evidence of Morris’ legacy, the chapter finishes with a close reading of a contemporary work of Welsh-language trans literature, the Young-Adult novella Robyn (2021) which both replicates some of Morris’ third-period themes while presenting liberating possibilities for trans literature in Wales.
