Review
Reinventing Anna
- By: CHRIS BAKER
- Published: 12/01/2009 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: Outlook
Biography of Anna Leonowens is far more interesting than the Hollywood version
It has long been known that Anna Leonowens was not the genteel English lady that she made herself out to be. Some have used this falsehood to diminish Anna's account of the inner palace of King Mongkut. But the truth about Anna's origins has remained elusive. Susan Morgan, a professor of English in the US, has dug a version out of the colonial archives. She uses it not to denigrate Anna but to celebrate her personal blow against the tyrannies of race and class.
BOMBAY ANNA: The real story and remarkable adventures of the Kingand I governess
In 1859, Anna arrived in Singapore with two infant children and a story of her origins that went like this. Her mother, who came from Welsh gentry, had married a knighted British military officer who was killed in the Sikh wars, and then a colonel in the British Indian army. Anna had been educated in Britain and travelled the world before marrying a well-established civilian in Bombay. Her stepfather opposed the match and severed relations. Her mother died. And the family wealth was lost in the failure of Indian banks after the mutiny. The story perfectly explained why such a genteel lady would seek employment as a teacher in Singapore.
The tragedies in Anna's account were all true. She had simply relocated the context from the bottom of the social scale to the top.
In reality, Anna's grandfather was a poor Welsh Methodist farm labourer who went to India in 1810 as the lowliest form of soldier. He married an Anglo-Indian girl and died at age 32, leaving his wife with debts and three children. Somehow they survived. At age 13 her daughter, Anna's mother, married another penniless soldier who also died young and in debt when Anna was still in the womb. As a penniless, orphaned, mixed-race girl in bigoted colonial society, Anna's life chances were pretty bleak.
Her first leg-up was a bit lucky. Her mother remarried to another penniless soldier, this time from famine-ridden Ireland. He not only lived a long time, but was diligent, and struggled up the lower levels of the imperial service as a road builder in western India. All the rest of Anna's extraordinary ascent was due to her own considerable talents. She had a quick mind, photographic memory, talent for languages and passion for self-education. She picked up Sanskrit and Persian around the schools and bazaars of Poona and Bombay well enough to teach Sanskrit at Amherst in later life. She married another diligent young Irishman who took the family from India to Australia and then Penang in search of a better life. Six weeks after he died young in Penang, Anna landed in Singapore and completely reinvented her prior life. She was 28.
Anna knew she was much more clever than most of those around her in colonial society, but also knew that her class and racial origins would never allow her talents to shine. Her gloriously simple solution was to get rid of those class and racial origins. "She had defied and vanquished the rigid social inequities of her time and place. She had chosen her parents. And she had chosen her class." Even her children never knew the reality.
In Singapore she gravitated to the small US community, partly because they were less likely to see through her subterfuge, but also because of their looser, more liberal attitudes. When two years later King Mongkut sent out enquiries for a female English teacher, Anna was almost the only woman in Singapore to fit the specifications.
Morgan's account of Anna's five years in Siam is the weakest part of the book. She uses no Thai sources, and even misses the handful of Anna's letters to Mongkut that recently came to light. She makes several small but telling errors. Her only original source for this period are Anna's letters to her pre-teen daughter at school in Ireland that are full of love but empty of detail. Morgan becomes involved in the dangerous business of deciding which bits of Anna's two books on her Bangkok experiences might be true. But she also makes one very important point. Anna's criticisms of Siam and the palace were not directed against polygamy, Buddhism or general Asian backwardness - the subjects of many orientalist works of this era. Indeed, she was generally very positive on Siam, unusually sensitive about Buddhism and exasperated by the blind arrogance of Western missionaries. Anna's criticisms were focused against slavery, the lifelong imprisonment of women inside the palace and what this did to the women's lives. Anna herself had escaped a kind of imprisonment by her own outrageous reinvention of herself. Her concern for the women of the palace was very genuine. "How I have pitied those ill-fated sisters of mine, imprisoned without a crime!" Her experience in Bangkok politicised Anna herself. She devoted the rest of her life to defence of the underdog.
In 1867 Anna took a holiday from Siam to see her daughter. While she was away, Mongkut died and Anna decided not to return. She fell in with the literary set in New York and decided to write a memoir of her time in Siam. The English Governess at the Siamese Court came out in 1870 and was an instant success. Her account of slavery in Siam played to the sensibilities of the victors in the recent US Civil War. They had overthrown slavery, and Anna's Siamese story showed they were right to have done so. Anna quickly produced a sequel, probably drawing more on her inventiveness than her memory. Though she titled the book (Romance of the Harem) as a romance, signalling fiction, both publishers and readers failed to appreciate this subtlety. In 1897 her former pupil, now King Chulalongkorn, met Anna in London and complained she had portrayed his father as a "wicked old man". He asked "You made all the world laugh at him, Mem. Why did you do it?" According to her granddaughter, Anna replied "Because I had to write the truth."
Anna became an author, lecturer, magazine journalist and minor celebrity. She travelled across Russia on the eve of the revolution. Both her children did well. Anna moved to Canada and became a grande dame - "everyone turned to her when she entered a room [because] there was something regal about her that commanded attention." It was a long way from the back end of an army barracks in western India.
Anna reinvented herself, but then was reinvented again, first by Margaret Landon and again by the US entertainment industry. Landon was the wife of a missionary who spent eight years in southern Siam in the 1930s. Landon became fascinated by Anna, and by chance got possession of an unfinished biography of Anna by a granddaughter. Her hugely successful Anna and the King was a pastiche of this biography, Anna's two Siam books and her own ideas. Whereas Anna's target had been slavery and imprisonment, Landon's version told the story of a genteel Christian lady struggling to civilise savages.
When the US suddenly became interested in Thailand during World War Two, Kenneth Landon was recruited by the US government as one of very few people who could be imagined as "experts" on the country. While he helped to create a role for Thailand in US policy, Margaret helped to create Thailand in the US public imagination. Morgan draws a nice parallel between these two projects. Both of them tended to "create a portrait of Siam and its people as backward and barbaric but nevertheless attractive and charming. They were not really enemies, just in need of Western guidance." Broadway, Hollywood and Yul Brynner just took it from there.
Morgan dug out the true story through some very dogged work in the colonial archives in the UK and India. She tells the story very well, portraying Anna as an auto-didact, adventurer and passionate educator who was always popular with the women and children around her. She presents Anna's story as a triumph of humanism and willpower over bigotry and prejudice. Anna lied, but why not, given the result?
Anna's life was much more fascinating than the King and I nonsense. Maybe Hollywood should try again.
- THE COST OF DEATH
- Checkmate!
- Mating tactics
- LIVING WILL
- Examining limits
- The happiness that lasts
- Creating opportunities for Thai-Muslim youths
- In the field
Keep this article in your social bookmark:
Or you can: 
