Anna Leonowens(1834-1915)
- Writer
Anna Edwards was born in India in 1834, the daughter of a cabinetmaker
who died three months before her birth. Her mother then remarried to
officer in the Engineers who sent Anna and her sister, Eliza, to a
school in England. The girls returned to India as teenagers and Anna
escaped her stepfather's plans to marry her to a man twice her age by
accompanying Rev.Percy Badger on a tour of the Middle East. She married
a clerk, Thomas Leon Owens, and they had two children, a daughter Avis
and a son, Louis. Her husband had trouble keeping a job, and moved his
family a great deal; for some unknown reason, he also changed his name
to Thomas Leonowens. After her husband died of apoplexy in Penang,
Malaya, Anna moved to Singapore, where she received an invitation to
teach English to the children of the Siamese King. She later
embellished her memoirs of this time (changing her place of birth to
Wales, and taking three years off her age; making her husband a major
in the British army instead of a lowly clerk; and adding the tale of a
concubine's brutal death, which never happened) which became famous.
Anna herself retired to Canada, where she became a suffragist before
her death. Her sister, Eliza, was the grandmother of the famous actor
Boris Karloff.
