BOMBAY ANNA

Probing biography of a woman who did a lot more than whistle a happy tune.

Anna Leonowens (1831–1915) became famous decades after her death as the well-born, gently bred governess in Margaret Landon’s 1944 bestseller, Anna and the King of Siam. Seven years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed her story into the blockbuster Broadway musical, The King and I. Both versions of Leonowens’s life were partial and not terribly accurate, notes Morgan (English/Miami Univ; Place Matters: Gendered Geography in Victorian Women’s Travel Writings About Southeast Asia, 1996, etc.). This wasn’t very surprising, however, since she invented and reinvented her own character as it suited her over the years. Morgan gives us the real woman, born Anna Harriet Edwards to a mixed-race teenage mother and a British soldier in the lowest ranks of the Indian army. Anna Harriet ran wild in the cantonments of multicultural Bombay before marrying Thomas Leon Owens, a clerk who took her to Australia and then to Malaysia before leaving her a widow with two small children in 1859. Leonowens arrived in Singapore six weeks later with a refurbished surname and a brand-new identity as a Caucasian, aristocratic English lady—just the sort the local gentry wanted to instruct their offspring. She went to work for King Mongkut of Siam in 1862, but the most famous portion of her life lasted only five years; by 1867, she had disembarked in New York to begin another career as an anti-slavery lecturer and author. “Appreciating the sheer inclusiveness of Anna’s varied life,” Morgan writes, “means trading in a narrow view of biography as a matter of individual achievement for a wider vision of the historical and personal range that composes even one individual’s history.” While her prose may occasionally be overly academic for the lay reader, Morgan paints a satisfying, multifaceted portrait.

Engrossing retelling of an extraordinary life, correcting many popular misconceptions.