Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess (Hardcover)

by Susan Morgan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
According to Morgan, the inspiration for the governess to the royal Siamese children in the 1950s musical The King and I, Anna Leonowens (1831–1915) was not the genteel British lady she purported to be, but a low-born, Anglo-Indian army brat who had severed ties with her family in India. A young widow living in Singapore, Leonowens was hired by King Mongkut to teach his wives and 82 children English. An absolute monarch committed to improving his people's lives and avoiding foreign control of his country, Mongkut had no romantic interest in Leonowens but shared her deep love of learning, occasionally consulted her on state issues and considered her arguments about the treatment of his enslaved harem. After Siam, the irrepressible Leonowens again reinvented herself as an eminent author and public lecturer in the U.S. and Canada, a social reformer and suffragist in Canada, a journalist in Russia and a Sanskrit scholar in Germany. Miami University English professor Morgan (Place Matters) uncovers and competently demonstrates the achievements of an extraordinary Victorian woman, but her biography is undermined by repetitious and charmless prose, underdeveloped analyses of Western/Thai political relationships and unfocused ramblings about the nature of biography. 15 b&w photos. (Apr.)
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Review
"A lively incarnation of Anna, one that gives the character of the musical and movies full humanity in historical context."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Morgan paints a satisfying, multifaceted portrait. Engrossing retelling of an extraordinary life, correcting many popular misconceptions."--Kirkus Reviews

"This informed and entertaining biography reveals Leonowens as an intriguing and complex woman, whose interests ranged far beyond young lovers and whistling happy tunes."--Foreword

"A fascinating, scholarly work."--Library Journal

"Pick up Bombay Anna and be prepared to find an inspiring story of an incredible woman."--Feminist Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (July 7, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520252268
• ISBN-13: 978-0520252264
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #152,075 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reality Trumps Fantasy, September 20, 2008

By	Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org) - See all my reviews

We all know the story of Anna and the king of Siam through the books, Broadway play and movie. But that romanticized version is more fiction than fact. What a shock to learn that Anna, the British governess to the king, really came from India! The daughter of an Englishman and a woman of mixed Indian and Anglo descent, she grew up in crowded military barracks, far from the ideal fantasy that she created. She married Corporal Thomas Leon Owens when she was eighteen, and had four children. After the deaths of her husband and two of her children, Anna took her remaining children to Singapore, arriving with the fantastic story that has clung to her all these years: that she was a British gentlewoman from Wales, widow of Major Thomas Leonowens, with two children born in England. But the true story is much more compelling.

Anna had a photographic memory. She was multilingual and tolerant of all cultures through her association with the people in India--Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. She learned Sanskrit and traveled extensively lecturing and teaching after her position ended in Siam.

Anna was the only Western person allowed in the king's harem of over sixty children, their mothers, and servants. Since they could not leave the harem, she viewed them as being incarcerated, and she worked diligently for their release. As researcher and author Susan Morgan writes, "Her critiques of Siam were not about how the West should treat the East. They were about how men should treat women, about the immense potential women have if only allowed to develop it freely, and about the equalities that should exist between people everywhere as a natural and spiritual right."

Morgan's extensive and careful research provides the reader with the facts of Anna's life and shows how this amazing woman truly lived and fought for women's rights by exemplifying the principles she espoused in her own life. Throughout the book, pictures of Anna at various ages add to the narrative. The only drawback is the repetition that makes some of the chapters sound as if they may have been written as stand-alone articles. Recommended for women's and multicultural collections.

by Susan Andrus
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous, July 7, 2008

By	Book Hound (New York) - See all my reviews

What a wonderful book! So full of information, so well-written and easy to read, I couldn't put it down. Author Susan Morgan not only brings Anna Leonowens's remarkable life to life, she makes the reader see why Leonowens made up so much of her "official" life story, and why the (false) image of blond Anna (a lie) dancing with King Monghut (played by Yul Brynner) in The King and I, has had such a powerful grip on our imaginations. Anna Leonowens could do a lot more than dance, and Susan Morgan can really tell a story.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many Toms foil the Author, February 11, 2009

By	Diotima "Mantinea" (Western Australia) - See all my reviews

A genealogy chart would have been useful and may have saved the author from making a literary faux pas. On page 161 she tells us that, after her sojourn in Siam, Anna Leonowens went to Ireland where "Mr. Wilkinson Sr. was delighted to welcome the widowed wife of his wife's brother". Well, not really. She was actually the widowed daughter of his wife's brother (a sergeant Thomas Edwards from Middlesex) i.e. his niece by marriage. The author then goes on to tell us that "It was a particularly joyous moment for Anna, ... to be welcomed into the family of her beloved Tom." Her "beloved Tom" was her late husband Thomas Louis LeonOwens who came from the diocese of Ossory in County Kilkenny (page 56). Thomas Wilkinson, Anna's uncle by marriage, lived in Enniscorthy in County Wexford.

Again on page 161, we are told that the Wilkinsons had "happy memories of Tom Leonowens as a boy". This is the first mention in the book of such a confluence and it is just misinformed invention. It was Anna's son, Louis Thomas Leonowens, whom the Wilkinsons "became fond of" when he was left with them (page 162).

The misconception may be explained by a second cousin (in 1939) having categorized Anna Leonowens as "the wife of a cousin" of his mother (on page 213) when, if fact, the two women were first cousins. In order to sustain Anna as "the wife of a cousin" her husband has been imagined as a cousin of the Wilkinsons. And from this error comes the fiction that the Wilkinsons knew Tom Leonowens as a boy.

On page 167 one or other of the Wilkinson Toms is said to be related to Anna as "her brother-in-law". Thomas Wilkinson Sr. was actually her mother's brother-in-law. Thomas Wilkinson Jr. was her first cousin. For either Tom to have been Anna's brother-in-law her husband, Tom Leonowens, would have had to have been a Wilkinson brother. The author has already described him as a cousin. He was, of course, neither.

Maybe some members of the Wilkinson family had recounted stories about Tom Wilkinson Jr. (the future London barrister) as a boy and the author, perhaps following Margaret Landon ("Anna and the King of Siam"), has assumed that Tom to be Thomas Leonowens.

The book is worth reading, however, as it counteracts Broadway's fantasy and Anna Leonowens own novels: "The English Governess at the Siamese Court" and "The Romance of the Harem". There is, however, a great deal of surmising about what Anna and the ladies of the harem "thought" and a fair amount of feminism and political correctness retrofitted to the nineteenth century.

The "book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% postconsumer waste" and the binding is glued, not sewn.