Getting to know real 'King and I' governess

The Real Story
and Remarkable Adventures
of the King and I Governess

By Susan Morgan.

University of California Press. 300 pp. $24.95.

Reviewed by Scotia W. MacRae

Will the real Anna please stand up?

Best known from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical

The King and I

, Anna Harriet Edwards Leonowens was the English widow who danced through the palace halls in Siam, educated the king's children, and protested the cruelties visited on wayward members of the monarch's household.

In

Bombay Anna

, Susan Morgan, distinguished professor of English at Miami University, has set out to discover the true story of the real person who in her 83 years, from 1831 to 1915, was witness to tumultuous change. Morgan deserves congratulations for a lively incarnation of Anna, one that gives the character of the musical and movies full humanity in historical context.

Morgan's account zips back and forth in time, giving us rich background and history, and sometimes confusing the reader as to where we are in Anna's life (or afterlife, as a star of a novel, a play, a musical and several films).

In her own memoirs, Anna claimed that she and her sister were born in Wales, that her mother and British army officer father went to India, leaving the girls behind, that the father died, the mother remarried, and the girls joined their mother and stepfather in Bombay at the ages of 14 and 15. She goes on to say that her stepfather did not approve of her choice of a husband, and that caused a break in family relations.

Morgan's meticulous research (including extensive worldwide travels) reveals a different story. Anna's grandfather, son of a Presbyterian minister, had come from England to India to seek his fortune and married a lady "not entirely white." Born in 1831 in India, Anna was the daughter of a soldier. Her father died before her birth and her mother remarried (another soldier) and had several more children. The children appear to have been educated at regimental schools, and Anna was a gifted student who learned many languages, including Persian and Sanskrit.

At age 18, Anna married the love of her life, Thomas Leonowens, a civilian clerk in India. The couple roamed the world in search of opportunity: Perth, Australia, Singapore and Penang, where Thomas died. The plucky widow invented a new biography that made her an upper-class Brit, rather than a mixed-race Anglo-Indian. She took her daughter, Avis, and son, Louis, to Singapore, where she opened a school for the children of British expats. There she was approached by the consul of the Siamese King Mongkut, a proponent of learning, who wanted his children, wives and concubines to be educated and to learn English. In 1862, Anna accepted the job and arrived in Bangkok.

As forward-looking as the king may have been, he was still an absolute monarch in a system that required courtiers to prostrate themselves, that perpetuated slavery, and that kept his numerous wives, concubines and young children confined to a bustling Inner City that they were forbidden to leave on pain of death.

Anna liked the king and loved her pupils, but she was forthright about refusing to live in the Inner City and did confront the king about corporal punishment.

When she left Siam in 1867 for her health (and visited England for the first time), she planned to return to the court. But in the year she was away, King Mongkut died. By then she was visiting the United States and ended up staying. Encouraged by her friends in literary and abolitionist circles, she wrote her 1870 memoir,

The English Governess at the Siamese Court

, followed by what purported to be a fictional book,

The Romance of the Harem

, in 1873.

Anna's books caused a furor. They were banned in Siam - as were the subsequent films that grew out of them, including the most recent, 1999's

Anna and the King

, starring Jodie Foster - and condemned by British writers, who accused her of ingratitude for criticizing her employer. Descendants of Mongkut have said that this educated and mild-mannered man could not have instigated some of the punishments she wrote about.

Even Morgan suspects that some of Anna's stories of torture of miscreants in the Inner City are exaggerated. She does not altogether make this case. Certainly the institution of slavery and the practice of torture, wherever they exist, including the Inner City, perpetrate unspeakable horrors that many find hard to believe. Many would have questioned the stories of American soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib if they hadn't seen the photos.

A second charge is that Anna as a memoirist is not altogether trustworthy. To be sure, Anna did reinvent herself, including the suppression of a possibly mixed-race origin. She did so to put her undeniably first-class brilliant and educated mind to work. And as an investigator, she succeeded where no one else has, even today. Even her harshest critics admitted that no Westerner had the access to the Inner City that she did.

Anna's granddaughter wrote about a reunion meeting between Anna and King Chulalongkorn, Mongkut's son, in London. When the king asked Anna why she had pictured his father as "a wicked old man," she replied, "Because I had to write the truth." The two parted as friends. In 1915, the year Anna died, the king abolished slavery in Siam.

Anna ended up living with her daughter in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where once again she started a school - this time, to educate her grandchildren. She was by then a well-known author and lecturer. Perhaps the next movie will pay tribute to the little girl of mixed heritage from India, who grew up to be an educator, early feminist, civil-rights advocate, writer, and role model whose works influenced the world.