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Jan Morris had two stipulations before she would agree to sit for a painting for the National Portrait Gallery in London. Ibsen, her Norwegian forest cat, should feature. And so should one of her calves. The gallery acceded, and the resulting portrait shows Morris, then just shy of 80, in a yellow jumper and dark green skirt, Ibsen glowering beside her bare legs. She was pleased with the portrait, though she thought it could, perhaps, have been a little larger.

Could any canvas contain Jan Morris? Janus-faced hardly does her justice. She was a sympathetic historian of empire who became a republican Welsh nationalist ( and who nevertheless accepted a CBE). The author of more than 50 books ranging across travel writing, biography, history, memoir and fiction, she was a workaholic who, as some of those books testify, could be shockingly lazy. A preacher of the “religion of kindness”, she was cruel to her children.

“‘Do you like her?’ is the question I am most often asked,” writes Sara Wheeler in this authorised biography. “But it’s not like that. I am human. So was she.”

Morris’s life seems impossibly rich. Born James Morris in 1926, she experienced the world first as a man, with all the opportunities that entailed. (Morris used the masculine when referring to this period, so does Wheeler, so will I.) As James, he won scholarships to private schools, and joined the army, with plum postwar deployments to Venice and Trieste. Oxford followed, then the Times, where he became a star foreign correspondent.

It was on Everest in 1953 that his career reached the stratosphere, scooping the world with news of the British expedition’s success while, back home, his wife, Elizabeth, gave birth. Fame followed, and fortune – of a writerly kind – wasn’t far behind. He interviewed Che Guevara, observed Adolf Eichmann “trembling” in the dock, and began churning out books – Coast to Coast, Coronation Everest, Venice – that were almost always popular and often critically acclaimed. He bought a manor and sent his son to Eton. And, over the next two decades, he transitioned from James to Jan.

James or Jan, Morris was a writer above all else. “It will make an excellent and not unentertaining piece of memoir!” she wrote to Elizabeth, the day after waking up from a vaginoplasty in a Casablanca clinic in the summer of 1972. The same month, Morris signed a contract with Faber for that memoir, in return for an advance of £10,000 – about £118,000 today.

The press response to Conundrum was predictable. “Jan Morris,” wrote Germaine Greer in the Evening Standard, “is still to me a man who has eaten a great many pills… a man who has had his penis cut off, but a man never-the-less.” The New York Times saw fit to publish a long spoof about a woman transitioning into a horse, and there was an on-screen savaging courtesy of the BBC. But friends rallied round, readers’ letters arrived in sacks, and the book is still read to this day.

What of the Morris marriage? Elizabeth – whose dementia was far advanced by the time Wheeler came to write this book – remains a somewhat elusive figure. She had five children (one of whom, Virginia, died in infancy) and raised them, mostly alone. Morris could be selfish and often autocratic. Why did Elizabeth stay? “Because I made a vow to God,” she once told her daughter, Suki. And yet the couple’s letters to one another overflow with professions of love, though there is less ambiguity with regard to the children. “She was a lousy parent who damaged all four of her living children one way or another,” Suki wrote after Morris’s death.

Like a skilful family therapist, Wheeler makes space for all this complication, mostly without judgment, though judgments of one’s own are hard to resist. Despite the unusual life, Morris ultimately emerges as an all too familiar character: one who diligently replied to adoring fans but dodged the family embrace; who hid from intimacy behind a veil of charm; who used her gift with words to override difficult truths. This is a sensitive, beautifully written, and masterly biography; a huge portrait whose perspective occasionally leaves Morris looking rather small.

• Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.