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Anna Leonowens (November, 1831 - January 19, 1915) is chiefly famous for being the British governess portrayed in the musical The King and I. The play, based on adaptations of her factually slipshod memoirs, provides a fictionalised look at her life in the royal court of Siam (present-day Thailand).

Early life and family

Leonowens claimed in her memoirs to have been born Anna Harriette Crawford in Caernarfon, Wales on 5 November 1834, daughter of Thomas Crawford, a British army captain, who died in action after her birth. However, contemporary research by W.S. Bristowe has discovered no record of her birth in Wales. The same research has suggested that she was born in India in November 1831, of an English father, Thomas Edwards, a cabinetmaker turned British Army sergeant who died soon after her birth, and a partly East Indian mother, Mary Anne Glasscott, and that her maiden name was Ann Harriet Edwards. If true, this would not be consistent with Leonowens' claim that she moved to India at the age of fifteen to live with her mother, after growing up with relatives and in boarding school.

Leonowens' widowed mother married Patrick Donohoe (an Irish corporal awarded the Victoria Cross circa 1857 for bravery) in Bombay, India. In 1845, her elder sister, Eliza Julia, married Edward John Pratt, a British civil servant who had served in the Indian Navy. Eliza and Edward had a son, Edward John Pratt, Jr., who in 1887, along with his wife, Eliza Sarah Millard, produced a son named William Henry Pratt, better known as film star Boris Karloff.

Marriage and widowhood

It was in India that she met and married in 1849, Thomas Leon Owens, a civilian clerk (and not an Army officer as she wrote in her books). After the death of their first child they reportedly set out for England, eventually settling in London where they brought up two healthy children, Avis and Louis. W.S. Bristowe's research has suggested, however, that the young Owens family moved frequently throughout Asia.

Avis would go on to marry Thomas Fyshe, a Canadian banker. Louis T. Leonowens moved to Siam with his mother during her stay at the Siamese court, and became an officer in the Siamese royal cavalry. He married Caroline Knox, a daughter of Sir Thomas George Knox, the British consul-general in Bangkok (1824-1887) and a Siamese wife, Prang Somkok, who died in 1888. Louis went on to found the trading company which bears his name to this day.

Thomas Leon Owens found work as a hotel keeper in Malaya but died of apoplexy in Penang in 1859, at age 33, leaving Anna an impoverished widow. She had never before needed, or planned, to work outside the home. The only way she now had of supporting herself, however, was to become a teacher; and so she opened a school for the children of officers in Singapore. She also changed her surname to Leonowens, which was how her husband's surname was written on his death certificate.

Royal governess

Though successful, the school could not support the family financially, and thus she came to the momentous decision to accept an offer made by the Siamese consul in Singapore and become a teacher of the children of the King Mongkut. She succeeded Dan Beach Bradley as teacher of the English language.

The reasons for her decision to send her daughter to school in the United Kingdom, while her son travelled with her to Bangkok, are not clear; though no doubt the position of women in the royal palace where she was going would not have been such as to allow her children to be treated equally. At around the time of her arrival, the King's eldest son, Chulalongkorn, was to be elevated to a position equivalent to Crown Prince, whilst his eldest daughter was enduring quite a different ceremony, that of the tonsure. It is no wonder that she made such a fuss about the delay by the King in fulfilling his promise to provide her with a house of her own. With sixty-seven children and numerous wives, it was hardly likely that the King and his ministers would take much notice of a woman, albeit a European woman who was responsible for the education of the King's children. King Mongkut, however, was a learned and cultured man, who was breaking new ground for Siam simply by deciding to educate his wives and children.

Relations with King Mongkut

The King himself was a complex character. Educated and intelligent, he was nevertheless constrained by his own upbringing and traditions. He may have felt a certain degree of respect for the European woman -- indeed, must have, otherwise he would not have entrusted the education of his children to her.

Leonowens wrote of his torture and execution of a girl, Tuptim, in her memoirs. It illustrates how different Siamese ideas of justice and religion were to those prevalent in Victorian era British Empire, let alone those in vogue in the 20th century. Some historians argued, however, that this incident was not recorded elsewhere outside Anna's memoir.

Anna's departure from Siam did not have, as popularly thought, anything to do with the King's death, and he did not plead with her to remain. However, she was in the process of negotiating a return to his court when he was taken ill and died.

That the King had some regard for Anna is indicated by the fact that she and her son were both mentioned in his will, though they never received the legacy.

Relations with King Chulalongkorn

The young King Chulalongkorn, elected according to Siamese tradition to succeed his father, made many reforms including the abolition of the practice of prostration before the royal person (although the practice of prostration was reverted by King Bhumibol Adulyadej). Anna's teaching of him cannot be given complete credit for this, but it would be surprising if she had not had some influence on him. By this time she was already contributing articles based on her experiences to the "Atlantic Monthly", which were later expanded into two volumes of memoirs which earned her immediate notoriety, despite the stilted manner in which she wrote.

She became personally acquainted with Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book whose anti-slavery message had not been lost on some of Anna's pupils in Siam. She visited the United States, Imperial Russia and other European countries, and eventually met King Chulalongkorn again when he visited London in 1897, thirty years after she had left Siam. He himself expressed his debt to her on that occasion.

Later years

In 1867, Anna went to live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she became involved in women's education, and was a suffragette and one of the founders of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. After 19 years, she moved to Montreal.

Anna Leonowens died on January 19, 1915 at 83 years of age, and was interred in the Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal, Quebec.

Truth or fiction?

Leonowens presented her own account as factual and for most of the 20th century it was accepted by most in the west as such, despite being strongly disputed in Thailand. The regular appearance of the story in various dramatic productions, plus Anna Leonowens' own ability to obscure the truth during her own lifetime meant that the fictional and true accounts of Anna Leonowens' life became very confused.

It was, in the end, a chance discovery by a scientist which brought inconsistencies in her accounts and the historical record to more general attention. In the 1970s, Dr. W.S Bristowe, a regular visitor to the Far East in search of spiders, was researching a biography of Leonowens' son, the successful businessman Louis T. Leonowens. After meticulous research Bristowe came to believe that significant parts of the famous tale were fictional. He located her actual birth certificate, marriage record and other pertinent legal documents, and published a book about his findings called Louis and the King of Siam in 1976. Nevertheless, Bristowe's work is not universally accepted, and accounts of Leonowens' life still vary. The true story of Anna Leonowens' remarkable life may never wholly be clear.

Anna Leonowens in fiction and film

It was only after Margaret Landon's novelisation of the original Leonowens memoirs in 1944 that the story of Anna and her stay in Siam became popular. It was quickly made into a film, Anna and the King of Siam, which took liberties with the plot; and the musical by Rodgers & Hammerstein followed not long afterwards, making even more drastic changes. In the 1990s, Jodie Foster starred in Anna and the King and a cartoon version of The King and I was released. Revived many times on stage, the musical has remained a favourite of the theatre-going public. However, the Rodgers and Hammerstein film is banned in Thailand.

External links

References

  • Louis and the King of Siam, W.S. Bristowe, Chatto & Windus, 1976, ISBN 0701121645

1831 births | 1915 deaths | British educators | Autobiographers | Women writers | Education in Thailand | History of Thailand

Anna Leonowens | Anna Leonowens | Anna Leonowens

 

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