Allegorizings

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Jan Morris delivers her final volume, brimming with reminiscences, meditations on daily life, and mini-essays on everything from maturity to whistling to Princess Diana.Not so long ago, feeling intimations of mortality, Jan Morris embarked on a wholly novel literary enterprise. What began as a series of high-minded letters to her late daughterin the style of Lord Chesterfield addressing his sonquickly transformed itself into a potpourri of mini-essays and vibrant reminiscences, organized around experiences both majestic and mundane, from traveling the world with her lifelong partner, Elizabeth, to sneezing and kissing and simply growing old.

So Allegorizings came to be, and so Morris decided that it should only be published upon her death, not because she had anything to hide but, merely, in parting. Featuring essays largely written in the early twenty-first...