Anna Leonowens

Anna Harriette Leonowens (born Ann Hariett Emma Edwards; 5 November 1831 – 19 January 1915) was an Anglo-Indian or Indian-born British travel writer, educator, and social activist. She became well known with the publication of her memoirs, beginning with The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), which chronicled her experiences in Siam (modern Thailand), as teacher to the children of the Siamese King Mongkut.

Leonowens's own account of her time in Siam was fictionalised in Margaret Landon's best-selling novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944) as well as adaptations such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 Tony Award-winning musical The King and I and its Academy Award-winning 1956 film adaptation, a short-lived CBS sitcom Anna and the King (1972), and the Academy Award-nominated film Anna and the King (1999).

During the course of her life, Leonowens also lived in Western Australia, Singapore and Penang, the United States, Canada, and Germany. In later life, she was a lecturer of Indology and a suffragist. Among other achievements, she co-founded the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Early life and family

Anna was born in Ahmednagar in the Bombay Presidency of Company-ruled India, on 5 November 1831, three months after the death of her father, Sergeant Thomas Edwards. While she was christened Ann Hariett Emma Edwards, Leonowens later changed Ann to Anna and Hariett to Harriette and ceased using her third given name (Emma).

Anna Leonowens's mother, Mary Ann Glascott, married Edwards, a non-commissioned officer in the East India Company's Corps of Sappers and Miners, on 15 March 1829 in St James's Church, Tannah, Bombay Presidency, British India. Edwards was from London and a former cabinetmaker.

Leonowens's maternal grandfather, William Vawdrey (or Vaudrey) Glascott, was an English-born commissioned officer of the 4th Regiment, Bombay Native Infantry, in the Bombay Army. Glascott arrived in India in 1810, and was apparently married in 1815, although his wife's name is not known. According to biographer Susan Morgan, the only viable explanation for the complete and deliberate lack of information regarding Glascott's wife in official British records is that she "was not European". Morgan suggests that she was "most likely ... Anglo-Indian (of mixed race) born in India." Anna's mother, Mary Anne Glascott, was born in 1815 or 1816.

For most of her adult life, Anna Leonowens had no contact with her family and took pains to disguise her origins by claiming that she had been born with the surname Crawford in Caernarfon, Wales, and giving her father's rank as captain. By doing so, she protected not only herself but her children, who would have had greater opportunities if their possibly mixed-race heritage remained unknown. Investigations uncovered no record of her birth at Caernarfon, although the town had long claimed her as one of its most famous natives.

A few months after Anna's birth, her mother married Patrick Donohoe, an Irish Catholic corporal of the Royal Engineers. The family relocated repeatedly within Western India, following Donohoe's regiment. In 1841, they settled in Deesa, Gujarat. Anna attended the Bombay Education Society's girls school in Byculla (now a neighbourhood of Mumbai) that admitted "mixed-race" children whose military fathers were either dead or absent. Leonowens later said she had attended a British boarding school and had arrived in India, which she described as a "strange land" to her, at the age of 15. Anna's relationship with her stepfather Donohoe was not a happy one, and she later accused him of putting pressure on her to marry a much older man as her sister had done. In 1847, Donohoe was seconded as assistant supervisor of public works in Aden, Yemen. It is unclear whether the rest of the family went with him or stayed in India.

On 24 April 1845, Anna's 15-year-old sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, married James Millard, a sergeant-major with the 4th Troop Artillery, Indian Army in Deesa. Anna served as a witness to this marriage. Their daughter, Eliza Sarah Millard, born in 1848 in India, married on 7 October 1864 in Surat, Gujarat, India. Her husband was Edward John Pratt, a 38-year-old British civil servant. One of their sons, William Henry Pratt, born 23 November 1887 upon their return to London, was better known by his stage name of Boris Karloff; Anna was thus his great-aunt. Anna Edwards never approved of her sister's marriage, and her self-imposed separation from the family was so complete that, a decade later, when Eliza contacted her during her stay in Siam, she replied by threatening suicide if she persisted.

Leonowens claimed that she had gone on a three-year tour through Egypt and the Middle East with the orientalist Reverend George Percy Badger and his wife. However, recent biographies consider this episode to be fictitious. Anna may have met Badger in India and listened to or read reports about his travels.

Marriage, Western Australia and widowhood

Anna Edwards married Thomas Leon Owens on Christmas Day 1849 in the Anglican church of Pune. In the marriage certificate, Owens merged his second and last names to 'LeonOwens'. Owens, an Irish Protestant from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, had come to India with the 28th Regiment of Foot in 1843. From a private, he rose to the position of paymaster's clerk (rather than the army officer suggested by Anna's memoir) in 1844, serving first in Pune, and from December 1845 until 1847 in Deesa. Biographer Alfred Habegger characterises him as "well read and articulate, strongly opinionated, historically informed, and almost a gentleman". Anna Edwards, who was seven years his junior, fell in love with him. However, her mother and stepfather objected to the relationship due to Owens' poor prospects for gainful employment and since he had been temporarily downgraded from sergeant to private for an unspecified offence. According to Leonowens', her stepfather had violently opposed the marriage; however, Patrick Donohoe signed the marriage certificate. The couple had four children together before Thomas Leonowens' death in 1859, and two died in infancy. Leonowens' first daughter, Selina, was born in December 1850 and died at seventeen months.

In 1852, the young couple, accompanied by Anna's uncle, W. V. Glasscott, sailed to Australia via Singapore, where they boarded the barque Alibi. While on board, Anna gave birth to a son named Thomas. On 8 March 1853, the Alibi was almost wrecked on a reef as it approached the Western Australian coast. Ten days later, Anna, Thomas, their newborn son and Glasscott arrived in Perth. Glasscott and Thomas Leonowens quickly found employment as clerks in the colonial administration. Later in 1853, Glasscott accepted a position as government commissariat storekeeper at Lynton, a small and remote settlement that was the site of Lynton Convict Depot. Glasscott became involved in frequent disagreements with the abrasive resident magistrate, William Burges. Within three years, Glasscott had returned to India and taken up a career in teaching before dying suddenly in 1856.

Anna Leonowens, using her middle name of Harriett, tried to establish a school for young ladies. In March 1854, the infant Thomas died at the age of 13 months, and, later that year, a daughter, Avis Annie, was born. In 1855, Thomas Leonowens was appointed to Glasscott's former position with the commissariat at Lynton, and the family moved there. At Lynton, Anna Leonowens gave birth to a son, Louis. During late 1856, Thomas Leonowens also served briefly as magistrate's clerk under William Burges. Like Glasscott, Thomas clashed with Burges but survived until the Convict Depot was closed in 1857, and he was transferred to a more senior position with the Commissariat in Perth.

The Leonowens family left Australia abruptly in April 1857, sailing to Singapore, and then moving to Penang, where Thomas found work as a hotel keeper. In or before the first week of May 1859, Thomas Leonowens died of "apoplexy" and was buried (7 May 1859) in the Protestant Cemetery in Penang. His death left Anna Leonowens an impoverished widow. She returned to Singapore, where she created a new identity as a Welsh-born lady and widow of a British army major. To support her daughter Avis and son Louis, Leonowens again took up teaching and opened a school for the children of British officers in Singapore. While the enterprise was not a financial success, it established her reputation as an educator.