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

Susan Morgan's absorbing biography of Anna Leonowens represents both an extraordinary adventure (for subject and biographer alike) and a superb piece of research. Morgan has patiently disentangled layers of myth and falsification to reveal what is surely a more accurate history of the woman whose life and writings have spawned musicals and films of immense popularity.

Leonowens's own account of her life was a glittering web of deceit designed to elevate her from her humble racially mixed and colonial beginnings. Despite the snobbery of her reinvention, as well as the condescension toward Siam that helped her sell books, it's hard not to admire a Victorian woman who so thoroughly took charge of her own life and avoided so many of the constraints that might have prevented her travels and her choices. Morgan, while recognizing and never minimizing Leonowens's capacity for, and skills in, large-scale deception, is nonetheless captivated by her subject. The result is a lively, carefully researched, and loving biography of one who lived life to the full, covered her tracks brilliantly, and lied her way into genteel society with panache.

While Leonowens's biography is the book's central concern (and consumes its title utterly), Morgan is too good a scholar not to explore a slew of related and important questions. Thus we are given a biography of Margaret Landon (Leonowens's biographer) and her husband Ken, whom Morgan sees as "possibly the most influential arbiters of U.S.-Thai relations in the middle years of the twentieth century" (222). Morgan also uses Leonowens's early years as a stage on which to consider the impact and consequences of nineteenth-century colonialism, for Leonowens grew up in British India, the child of low-born parents who over time improved their standing. As a mixed-race female, her future should have been quite predictable and not overly exciting, more like that of her sister Eliza who married an East India Company soldier in 1845 with whom she had two children before becoming widowed. Her daughter, Eliza Sarah, married "up"—as Leonowens had done in 1849—to a twice-widowed lieutenant in the Company army.

Leonowens, unlike Eliza, married an Irishman, and a middle-class Protestant Irishman at that. Had Tom not died young in 1859, Leonowens's life might have followed a more conventional path. Widowed with two small children, Leonowens's new and fantastical identity began to emerge in earnest, and for the rest of her life as she criss-crossed the globe she would represent herself as a Welsh gentlewoman of good family forced to earn her own living. As Morgan frequently notes, her considerable intellect and near-photographic memory served her well, and she kept her secret close throughout her life (she died in 1915). A 1976 revisionist biography revealed her Indian origins, but it is only in Morgan's new work that the rest of her days come more clearly and accurately into focus. What sets Morgan's work apart is not just the indefatigable research that has allowed her to fill in many of the blanks and correct many errors (mostly caused by Leonowens's own diversionary and creative lies), but her understanding of what it means to write the biography of a subject intent on derailing such a project, one who also held a number of distinct careers—from wife and mother to teacher, writer, lecturer, and journalist, and thence to full-time grandmothering. Morgan, more than her predecessors, proves up to the task and has written an engaging and readable as well as impressively researched biography.

The book is marred by an odd and avoidable factual error. Singapore did not become a Crown Colony in 1858, as Morgan claims on page 84. As one of a group of British colonies in the Malay Archipelago, it was part of the Straits Settlements...