Anna Leonowens

Indian-born English teacher and writer

• Born: November 6, 1831
• Birthplace: Ahmadnagar, India
• Died: January 19, 1915
• Place of death: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Leonowens achieved posthumous fame as the teacher portrayed in the film Anna and the King of Siam and the musical The King and I, both of which were inspired by her published memoirs. However, modern scholarship has shown that she falsified important details of her life and provided an inauthentic account of the royal court of Siam. Her most significant work came later, when she was a woman suffrage leader and promoted cultural, educational, and social improvements for the communities in which she lived.

Early Life

The details of the early life of Anna Leonowens (LEE-on-OH-ihns) have long been obscured by her deliberate attempts to hide her Asian roots in order to protect her image as a proper Englishwoman. She claimed to have been born in 1834 in Wales, but records show that she was actually born in 1831 in India, where her father, Thomas Edwards, had gone for military service. He died there several months before she was born. Her widowed mother, Mary Anne Glasscott Edwards, gave her the name Mary Anne Harriette Emma Edwards. Her mother had also been born in India and appears to have some Asian ancestry—a fact that Leonowens later tried to hide. Within a year of her father’s death, her mother remarried to achieve financial security.

Mary Anne’s childhood home was unhappy. She loathed her stepfather and had to endure crowded military barracks, surrounded by soldiers and their families. Like other military children, she probably performed routine chores and attended the garrison’s school, in which she would have read British and Indian history and literature. While exploring her local community, she learned Indian languages from her mother and became aware of Indian traditions and religions.

Historians believe that Mary Anne and her older sister, Elizabeth, briefly attended school in England, coming home in 1845, when Elizabeth was fifteen, an age at which children of British military personnel were expected to begin military service, work, or marry. Mary Anne was appalled when Elizabeth married an older man, and she vowed that she would not wed merely for survival. Instead, she toured Egypt and the Middle East with the regiment’s chaplain, the Reverend George Percy Badger.

Before Mary Anne departed on that trip, a military clerk named Thomas Leon Owens proposed marriage to her. After she returned to India, she married Leon Owens on December 25, 1849. They first settled at Bombay, then traveled to England and Australia. Mary Anne bore four children, two of whom survived infancy. She and her husband moved to Penang, in what is now Malaysia, where her husband died in May, 1859. The record of his death spelled his surname as one word, Leonowens—a form that Mary Anne used thereafter. At what point Mary Anne started calling herself “Anna” is uncertain. “Anna” may have been a family nickname, or it might have been a clue to her identity, as anna was also the name of a low-value Indian coin.

Life’s Work

After her husband died, Anna Leonowens taught in Singapore to earn her living. Her pupils praised her storytelling. At that time, King Mongkut (Rama IV) of Siam (now Thailand) was interested in reforming and modernizing his autonomous kingdom and was seeking a tutor to teach him English and to educate his numerous royal children and wives about Western culture. The first European teachers whom he hired were all missionary wives who tried to convert his family to Christianity. As he was a former monk and devout Buddhist, he wanted a teacher who would not attempt to proselytize.

In February, 1862, Mongkut contacted Leonowens after the Siamese consul at Singapore recommended her as a teacher. Because of her part-Indian roots, Leonowens knew that racial prejudice within the British Empire might threaten her employment, so she saw working in Siam as an opportunity to re-create herself where no one knew her past to dispute facts. She severed contact with her sister, who she feared might expose her Asian background, and declared she was a respectable English widow working only to support her family. After sending her daughter to England, she traveled by steamer to Siam with her son. They arrived in Bangkok in March, 1862, and began their lives there living in the Grand Palace, a large walled compound adjacent to the Chao Phraya River.

Leonowens taught her royal pupils at a temple located within the Grand Palace’s harem community. This area housed a population of several thousand women and children. Leonowens herself lived outside the Grand Palace’s walls but had open access to the harem. Her worries about discrimination intensified when British expatriates living in Bangkok excluded her from social functions, despite her affiliation with the royal court. Missionaries, however, became her closest friends and accepted her.

Leonowens’s royal students included Prince Chulalongkorn, the future King Rama V. Later, Leonowens implied that she had inspired and shaped that king’s reform-oriented policies. She also later claimed to have helped King Mongkut write letters to Western recipients, suggesting words and phrasings that best communicated his intentions, while remaining compatible with Western diplomatic protocol.

In 1868, Leonowens left Siam, took her son to a school in England, and retrieved her daughter. After Mongkut died later that year, his heir did not ask Leonowens to return. Leonowens then moved to New Brighton, New York, where she started a school for teachers. James Fields, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, expressed interest in Leonowens’s years in Bangkok and persuaded her to write articles about her Siamese experiences for the magazine. Fields encouraged Leonowens to write more, and Leonowens published her first book, The English Governess at the Siamese Court , in 1870. She used that title, although she had never served as a royal governess. Her second book, initially titled The Romance of the Harem (1872), was reissued as The Romance of Siamese Harem Life (1873) in the United States and England.

Victorian reviewers praised Leonowens’s books for denouncing slavery, but reviewers who were knowledgeable about Siam and its monarchy criticized the books’ flaws and incorrect geographical names and historical dates and regarded Leonowens as a noncredible source. For example, her books contain detailed conversations with harem women, even though she was never fluent in the Siamese (Thai) language. She also wrote a sensational description of torture and a public execution that never occurred and claimed that prisoners were housed in underground dungeons that could not even exist in the riverside palace.

Leonowens also exaggerated her importance to the Siamese. In fact, court members often considered her a gossip and annoyance. Some critics charged that Leonowens plagiarized other writers’ accounts of Siam to describe places where she had never been. Finally, Leonowens falsely stated her father had been a wealthy officer and provided different names for her family and sites associated with her childhood. However, contemporary critics did not question her family history, only misrepresentations of Siam. Siamese readers resented her depictions, suggesting she had written books solely to earn money.

Despite criticisms of her books, Leonowens enjoyed celebrity and was paid to lecture. In 1878, her daughter married a Nova Scotia banker, and Leonowens moved to Halifax to live with her daughter. She then often visited New York and Boston on writing and speaking business. After Czar Alexander II of Russia was assassinated in 1881, she traveled throughout Russia writing articles for the magazine Youth’s Companion. That magazine offered her full-time editorial work, but she preferred to concentrate her attention on supplementing the educations of her five grandchildren. In 1884, she published Life and Travels in India: Being Recollections of a Journey Before the Days of Railroads .

In 1887, Leonowens acted as an art patron by planning an exhibition and speaking at fund-raising events to collect money for Halifax’s Victoria School of Art (later known as the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which includes the Anna Leonowens Gallery). She edited The Art Movement in America in 1887 and published Our Asiatic Cousins in 1889. She also started community book clubs. She briefly lived in Germany, while her grandchildren were studying there, and returned to Halifax in 1893. A suffragist, she established the Halifax Local Council of Women, seeking civic improvements, and served as president of the Woman’s Suffrage Association in 1895. Two years later, she attended the National Council of Women of Canada’s conference at Halifax. While accompanying one of her granddaughters to Europe for musical training, she visited with King Chulalongkorn in London.

In 1901, Leonowens moved to Montreal, Quebec, where her son-in-law had transferred to another bank. A stroke later ruined her health, and she died in Montreal in January, 1915. Her obituary repeated the biographical errors she had created to preserve her carefully crafted image as a proper Englishwoman.

Significance

Leonowen’s memoirs, although tainted, provide valuable information about Siam that would otherwise be inaccessible to scholars. As an inside observer at the royal court, she was aware of routine life in the palace. By the 1940’s, Leonowens’s books had fallen out of print and her adventures were forgotten. All that changed in 1944, when Margaret Landon published a best-selling biography of her and popular culture appropriated her story. Landon perpetuated most of Leonowens’s falsehoods about her life, believing that she was reporting facts. Those inaccuracies and misinformation remained when publishers reprinted editions of both Landon’s and Leonowens’s books.

Leonowens enjoyed her fame and profit but could not have envisioned that her life would one day inspire major motion pictures (Anna and the King of Siam, 1946; Anna and the King, 2000; The King and I, 1956); a Broadway musical, The King and I (1951); and even a television series, Anna and the King (1972) that would perpetuate her misinformation. Translations of her and Landon’s books and films would spread her story worldwide, misleading readers and viewers who had no experience themselves with Siamese culture. Many Thais were outraged by the films that they considered disrespectful because no Westerner could influence and control Thai politics as Leonowens claimed to have done. Other Thais viewed the musical performances as comedies because they were so ludicrous. Mongkut’s descendant emphasized Leonowens had not significantly affected royals. The Thai government later banned Leonowens’s books, although some stores stocked them for tourists.

It was only in the late twentieth century that researchers began detecting inconsistencies in Leonowens’s autobiographical information. They located documents to determine facts, yet missing records render Leonowens’s true story incomplete.

Bibliography

Bristowe, William S. Louis and the King of Siam. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976. Biographer of Leonowens’s son who discovered Leonowens’s fabrications during his research and located vital and archival records to secure evidence countering the false autobiographical information Leonowens created.

Dow, Leslie Smith. Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond the “King and I.” Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia: Pottersfield Press, 1991. Valuable for details concerning Leonowens’s post-Siam life, especially her years in Canada. However, the book relies on her Siamese accounts and repeats many errors regarding her early life.

Landon, Margaret. Anna and the King of Siam. New York: John Day, 1944. Partially fictionalized and inaccurate portrayal of Leonowens’s life in Siam based on her memoirs and family and contemporaries’ recollections. This book is the source used for stage and screen adaptations.

Moffat, Abbot Low. Mongkut: The King of Siam. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961. Describes the king’s perspective of Leonowens. An appendix explores Leonowens’s role as a historian of nineteenth century Siam.

Warren, William. The Truth About Anna… and Other Stories. Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2000. Discusses flaws in Leonowens’s autobiographical and historical accounts and offers insights regarding Thai reactions to her memoirs.

Wyatt, David K. Thailand: A Short History. 2d ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Comprehensive account that provides context for Leonowens’s interactions with Mongkut and Chulalongkorn and the significance of her educational employment.