Anna Leonowens

Anna Leonowens
Anna Leonowens
Born	November 5, 1831; Ahmadnagar, India
Died	January 19, 1915 (aged 83); Montreal, Québec, Canada

Anna Leonowens (November 5, 1831 - January 19, 1915) was a British travel writer and educator, known for teaching the wives and children of Mongkut, king of Siam, and for co-founding the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Early life and family

Anna Leonowens was born Anna Harriet Edwards in Ahmadnagar, India on 6 November, 1831. She was the second daughter of Sergeant Thomas Edwards, a former cabinetmaker, and his partly East Indian wife, Mary Anne Glasscott. Her father died about the time of her birth, and her mother married Patrick Donohoe, an Irish corporal who was awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery in Bombay during the Indian Mutiny. In 1845, Anna's elder sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, 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, with his wife, Eliza Sarah Millard, had a son named William Henry Pratt, better known as film star Boris Karloff.

Marriage and widowhood

In 1849 Anna Edwards married Thomas Leon Owens or Leonowens, a civilian clerk, in Poona, and the couple moved first to Perth, Western Australia, and then to Singapore and Malaya, where Thomas found work as a hotel keeper, only to die of apoplexy in 1859 at the age of 33, leaving Anna an impoverished widow. Of their four children, the two eldest had died in infancy. To support her surviving daughter Avis and son Louis, Leonowens became a teacher, and opened a school for the children of British expatriates in Singapore. However the enterprise was a financial failure.

Royal governess

In 1862 Leonowens accepted an offer made by the Siamese consul in Singapore, Tan Kim Ching, to teach the English children of King Rama IV. The king wished to have his 39 wives and concubines educated along with his 82 children. Leonowens sent Avis to the United Kingdom to be educated, and took Louis with her to Bangkok. She succeeded Dan Beach Bradley, an American missionary, as teacher to the Siamese court.

Relations with Mongkut

Leonowens worked at the royal court until 1867, a period of nearly six years, first as a teacher and later as language secretary.

Leonowens's accounts of her experiences in the king's service, beginning with The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), have been attacked by some historians as unreliable. Her sometimes unflattering account of life at the court is strongly disputed in Thailand, and she has been accused of exaggerating her influence with the king.

Leonowens was a feminist and tended to focus on what she saw as the subjugated status of Siamese women. She emphasised that although the king was a forward-looking ruler, he desired to preserve certain cultural traditions, not all of which she approved. Her second book, Romance of the Harem (1873), is a collection of tales based on palace gossip, including the king's alleged torture and execution of one of his concubines, Tuptim. The fact that this incident has not been recorded anywhere else has been used to cast doubt on her account.^[1]

Leonowens was negotiating a return to the king's court in 1868 when he fell ill and died. The new monarch, fifteen-year-old Chulalongkorn, wrote her a warm letter of thanks for her services, but did not invite her to return. The late king did mention Anna and her son in his will, though they never received the legacy.

Relations with Chulalongkorn

Chulalongkorn, who succeeded his father, made many reforms, including the abolition of the practice of prostration before the royal person. Leonowens suggested this was due to her influence. By now she was contributing articles based on her experiences to the Atlantic Monthly, which were later expanded into the two volume memoirs which earned her immediate fame.^{[citation needed]}

Leonowens became personally acquainted with Harriet Beecher Stowe,^{[citation needed]} author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book whose anti-slavery message Leonowens would claim influenced Chulalongkorn's abolition of slavery in his own country. Leonowens visited the United States, Imperial Russia and other European countries, and eventually met Chulalongkorn again when he visited London in 1897, thirty years after she had left Siam. He expressed his thanks to her on that occasion.^{[citation needed]}

Later years

Leonowens went to the United States and after her first book was published taught at the Berkeley School in New York City, beginning in the fall of 1880. Her name appeared in advertisements for the school in The New York Times in the late summer of 1880. Later, she 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 nineteen years, she moved to Montreal, Quebec.

Avis eventually married Thomas Fyshe, a Canadian banker. Louis 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 (d. 1888). Louis founded the trading company that still bears his name.

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

Anna Leonowens in fiction and film

The Margaret Landon novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944) provides a fictionalised look at her life in the royal court. In 1946 this novel was adapted as a dramatic film of the same name, starring Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison. In response Thai authors Seni and Kukrit Pramoj wrote their own account in 1948 and sent it to American politician and diplomat Abbot Low Moffat 1901-1996), who drew on it for his biography Mongkut, the King of Siam (1961). Moffat donated the Pramoj brothers' manuscript to the Library of Congress in 1961. (Southeast Asian Collection, Asian Division, Library of Congress)

Leonowens's story was retold most famously in a film musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein in 1956, The King and I (1956), starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. In 1972 an American TV series with Samantha Eggar was produced. In 1999, Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat starred in Anna and the King. Even 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 fictional depiction of the king is unpopular in Thailand, where the Rodgers and Hammerstein film remains officially banned.

References

^ STEVEN ERLANGER (1996-04-07). "THEATHER;A Confection Built on a Novel Built on a Fabrication". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-08-08.

The King of Siam speaks, by Seni Pramoj and Kukrit Pramoj ISBN 9748298124
Louis and the King of Siam, W.S. Bristowe, Chatto & Windus, 1976, ISBN 0-7011-2164-5
Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond The King and I, Leslie Smith Dow, Pottersfield Press, 1992, ISBN 0-919001-69-6