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I have done research for this biography for more than a decade, and in that time have been helped in significant and often essential ways by many more people than I can name in this space. My first debt must be to the organizations whose financial support made this research possible. My thanks particularly go to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for a year of support in which I learned about the British East India Company and wrote a draft of the biography. I am also profoundly grateful to my professional home, Miami University of Ohio, for their generous and continuous financial support. They have been extraordinary in their belief in this project, their commitment to the research, and their willingness over several years to help me fund the costs of searching for Anna’s hidden tracks. My support at Miami has come from a variety of sources, most notably the English Department, the Miami University Distinguished Professor research fund, the College of Arts and Sciences Assigned Research Appointment, the College of Arts and Sciences Summer Research Appointment, the International Studies Program, and the Philip and Elaine Hampton Fund. My second debt is to all the research library staff in so many places who listened to my often vague questions, typically formulated better ones, and then spent hours and often days and weeks lending their superb knowledge of their holdings to the task of guiding my search for evidence that might or might not be there. I am deeply grateful to the staffs of the Record Office in Devon, England, the Elphinstone College newspaper collection in Mumbai, the Hayes Library in Bangkok, the Chulalongkorn University Special Collections in Bangkok, the National Library in Singapore, the National Records Office in Penang, the Kroch Library at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the South/Southeast Asia Collection at the University of California, Berkeley. I am particularly grateful to three librarians. I thank David Malone, xvii acknowledgments head of Archives and Special Collections, and David Osielski, reference archivist, Special Collections, at the Buswell Memorial Library at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. Last, I thank the incomparable and indefatigable Tim Thomas, reference specialist and researcher extraordinaire, at the Oriental and India Office Library, now the Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections , at the British Library, London. My third debt is to the many dear friends and colleagues who encouraged and contributed to this project. My beloved colleagues in Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, Teresa Mangum, Deborah Morse, Anca Vlasopolis, and Richard Stein, have been unfailing in their attentiveness, productive evaluations, and general support. In my own department I have been blessed with the support of Jackie Kearns and the perceptive advice and encouragement of Mary Jean Corbett, Kate Ronald, and Barry Chabot. I am the grateful recipient of genealogical research on the Owens and Wilkinson families, generously provided in private correspondence by Tim Wilkinson and Sue Collins. I particularly thank Fran Dolan, who continually understood the project more insightfully than I and so generously gave me the critical tools to see what she saw. Finally, I offer my gratitude to Ethan and Seneca Goodman, who accepted for most of their growing up that the best vacations were spent in the hotels and libraries of Southeast Asia. My greatest debt is to Eric Goodman, who supported the project before I did and participated in the pursuit of Anna all along the way. xviii a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s ...

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