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    Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond 'The King and I'
    Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond 'The King and I'
    Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond 'The King and I'
    Ebook119 pages1 hour

    Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond 'The King and I'

    By Leslie Smith Dow

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    This is a brand-new e-edition of the award-winning paperback book originally published by Pottersfield Press. Anna Leonowens was famous for tutoring the children and wives of King Maha Mongkut (Rama IV) of Siam (now Thailand). Yet she disguised her lowly birth in India and pretended to be an English Governess. She spent forty years in Canada (in Halifax and in Montreal) following her glamorous job, where she founded NSCAD and was involved in many causes and organizations. In her spare time, she voyaged alone to Russia and wrote several books, including the fabulous bestseller, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, which astonished the world, and no group more so than the Siamese Royal Family. She died in 1915, and is buried in Mont Royal Cemetary in Montreal, Quebec.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeslie Smith Dow
    Release dateMar 2, 2017
    ISBN9781370582044
    Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond 'The King and I'
    Author

    Leslie Smith Dow

    As a rock 'n' roll journalist for several years, I interviewed and reviewed acts like Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden, BB King, James Cotton, Supertramp, Axl Rose, Tragically Hip, Ria Mae, and many more. Somehow, the weirdness of writing concert reviews at 3 a.m. in an empty newsroom just never left me. That experience, combined with growing up in a very insular but sinful small town, and the strange events that occur during frequent travelling has left me permanently warped. My only outlet is the Badass Bingo gang, who figure prominently in the Badass Hippie Tales series. They have really got a hold on me! Check out Ricki Wilson's Indie Spotlight: http://rickiwilson.com/4/post/2017/03/indie-spotlight-on-badass-hippie-tales-by-leslie-smith-dow-lesliesmithdow.html I am the author of several print and e-books including the award-winning historical biographies Adele Hugo: La Miserable and Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond the King and I. Adele Hugo: La Miserable has recently been re-released as an e-book, with a new Afterword detailing the fascinating mystery of a painting which could link Adele and the founder of French Impressionist painting, Edouard Monet. Read Elissa Barnard's review of the re-issued e-edition of Adele Hugo in www.localxpress.ca at https://www.localxpress.ca/local-arts-and-life/adele-hugo-still-haunts-author-443323. See details of the new Afterword, featuring the mystery of Adele and French painter Edouard Manet at https://gooselane.com/collections/e-books/products/adele-hugo. I am also a beekeeper, farmer and owner of Red House Honey, which produces all-natural raw, kosher honey on the shores of the St. Lawrence River. AWARDS/JURIES: I received the Canadian Authors' Association Air Canada Award for Most Promising Canadian Author under 30 and the Dartmouth Writers’ Award for Non-Fiction. I was a finalist for the Ontario Trillium Award, the Ottawa Citizen and Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton writing awards. I have received grants for my writing from the Canada Council, the City of Ottawa and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton and I have been part of selection juries for writing grants and the on-line poetry magazine, ByWords.

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      Book preview

      Anna Leonowens - Leslie Smith Dow

      Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond ‘The King and I’

      by Leslie Smith Dow

      Originally published by Pottersfield Press, Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1991

      Copyright 1991 Leslie Smith Dow

      Published with the support of the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture, and the Canada Council

      Pottersfield Press

      Lawrencetown Beach

      R.R. #2, Porters Lake, NS

      Canada B0J 2S0

      All rights reserved.

      Please leave a positive review at https://www.amazon.com/author/lesliesmithdow

      FOREWORD

      Anna Leonowens was rather small with a stately appearance, and everyone listened when she spoke in her beautiful voice. Piercing brown eyes looked out from a face whose complexion had been ruined by the climate of the Orient, and she wore her wavy grey hair parted in the middle, brushed upward and coiled into a pretzel on the top of her head, usually held in place with a silver comb….She always wore a ring with an uncut emerald given to her by one of King Mongkut’s wives, Lay Son Klin, and [a] tiger-claw brooch made from two of the tiger’s claws set in fine engraved gold from the tiger which her husband had shot just before his death. After the heat of the Far East, she minded the cold in the big drafty rooms of the Halifax houses of the last century, and usually sat with a black shawl around her shoulders. Her daughter Avis kept asking: Are you warm enough, Mama?

      —Phyllis R. Blakeley, Anna of Siam in Canada, in The Atlantic Advocate, Jan., 1967.

      Piecing together the life of Anna Leonowens has taken some detective work, some psychoanalysis, a good deal of reflection and sometimes, just plain intuition. There seemed to be something missing from the story of her life as I knew it, and I turned it over and over in my mind, searching for a hidden spring or some sort of code that would help me unravel the mystery of Anna. But there was none.

      Gradually though, after poring over her writings, her behaviour and the attitudes of her contemporaries. I began to see a clearer picture. Her past began to fill in, although I felt many times that I was painting by numbers, without the benefit of the numbers. Even after I had read everything I could get my hands on which referred to this most interesting woman, it seemed that somehow something wasn’t quite right. Descriptions of her life were either too pat or too condemning. I found no less than four writers who had demolished her reputation and branded her a fake.

      Such descriptions seemed to me eminently unfair. She was creative with the truth, to be sure, but not a fake. It is clear that she sought to keep certain elements of her background secret. Diligent research has served only to render the details of her life as she related it even more ambiguous. On the other hand, tantalizing fragments of another existence materialize when her own accounts are disregarded, and the pieces of what seems to have been a secret life begin to fall into place.

      Depending upon whom one chooses to believe, Anna Leonowens must have been among the most accomplished, fearless and adventurous of Victorian ladies—or a complete fraud who covered up her ignoble origins by inventing and exaggerating at will simply to sell copies of her books. Her story of a proper English governess confronting the monstrous Oriental monarch seems a trifle overdone. Even the most accommodating readers have had to make some effort to suspend their disbelief that an English governess could not only rise to become the right hand of the powerful and erudite King of Thailand, but to teach a man who spent 27 contemplative years as a Buddhist monk a thing or two about compassion. The truth, as with most things, lies in the boggy ground somewhere between the conflicting descriptions of Anna as a Victorian human rights crusader along the lines of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Anna as a kind of benign Mata Hari of literature.

      Yet a chance conversation with an acquaintance several years ago shed a little light into Anna’s magisterial behaviour around the Thai King, the prime minister and his entourage. The woman (who I’ll call Catherine) was English by birth, and had trained as a proper British nanny, in the true Mary Poppins style. She had worked for wealthy families internationally, including a long stint in Saudi Arabia. There, as nanny to the children of a large and prominent family, she had been responsible for virtually every facet of their material lives. She was given free rein to purchase furnishings for the nursery, to choose the children’s clothing and provide suitable toys; her budget was unlimited, and her taste unquestioned. Innocently, I asked Catherine if she had been well-treated. The small woman before me, clad in jeans and a sweater, drew herself into an erect, formal posture. I could envision her as a proper matron in a starched uniform—cap, apron and all—as she said, in a rather sharp voice, You do not allow yourself to be treated badly. This, I think, had been precisely Anna’s strategy in standing up for herself.

      It was not until I made a chance visit to Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario (which would have been in use around the time young Anna was growing up in India) that I was able to unlock some of the mystery surrounding Anna’s early life. She grew up in an Anglo-Indian military family, one whose domestic arrangements could only be described as squalid, a fact that hit home forcefully as I peppered the patient staff with questions about living conditions of army families in the colonies, including India. The stigma attached to being an army rat, as such children were then, called was enormous, particularly for a girl. The chances of escaping a life following the drum were almost nil. Unless a particularly bright females could get on teaching at the regimental school, or nursing in the infirmary, she would almost certainly be forced, through sheer economic necessity, to marry a much older soldier some time between her thirteenth and fifteenth birthdays.

      Knowing these facts provided me with a motive for Anna’s inventive vagueness about her past. It also partly explained her sudden appointment as royal governess. The seemingly inexperienced widow had likely been picked as a youngster to assist in the schoolroom of the army barracks. By the time she was 18, it would be reasonable to expect that she already had several years’ teaching under her belt, and in some tough classrooms. This could explain why she had not already been married off. Drawing on her teaching experience and fortified by her ambition and intelligence, Anna invented an appropriate background for her new life as a proper Victorian lady, much the same as famed explorer-journalist Henry Morton Stanley fabricated his. Her forceful personality and resilience helped her make the transition to a new life that would have been impossible for most other young women in her social situation. But that, surely, is beside the point. What is important is her gumption; she did what was necessary to achieve the sort of life upon which she had set her sights. Her marriage to Thomas Leon (or Lean) Owens was a happy one, though their time in Australia fraught with hardships which began before they even disembarked from their ship. His death in Penang devastated her and left her nearly penniless. These events, though, shaped her into the formidable and famous woman she would become.

      There are no hard and fast answers about Anna’s life. There are few details which can be verified beyond the shadow of a doubt and the sketchiness of many events in her life is partially due to the unfortunate habit of journalists past and present of simply copying what had previously been written about her.

      Why, I wondered, was it so impossible for her critics to praise in a woman the very qualities they applauded in male adventurers such as Stanley? At the time only a scant amount of independent research had actually been conducted into Anna’s life, and consequently, errors in fact had mushroomed into widely-accepted legend.

      The real Anna, possessed of such formidable talent and courage, was much more than an English governess at the Siamese court: she was a brilliant storyteller and lecturer, an accomplished journalist and celebrated author, an Oriental scholar and linguist, an adventurer and social activist. Unfortunately, by the time she died in 1915 in Montreal, Anna’s adventures, and her marvellous talents, had been nearly forgotten.

      In 1944, inspired by Anna’s books, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, and Siamese Harem Life, Margaret Landon published her own re-written and highly-coloured version of Anna’s life. It caused a sensation, comparable only to the publication of the original books in 1870 and 1872. Anna and the King of Siam made its debut near the end of the turmoil of World War II, this glimpse into a fantastic, exotic land and lifestyle was a welcome respite for millions. In a short time, the book was reprinted 13 times. Reader’s Digest even came out with a condensed version. Landon’s book was published in Sweden, Spain and Thailand and 12 other countries; there were armed services and juvenile

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