Why Anna Leonowens was offered a "Small Brick House Adjacent To the Palace."

Well, talk about jumping the gun on research. Here I was writing snidely about why anybody would want a brick house in Siam in the 1860's, in a super hot and humid climate, and I forgot all about the "white ants," that is to say termites. Apparently, if a house is not built completely of teak, they will eat it up very quickly, so a brick house necessary.

Also, Bangkok was built on marsh and river, with houses on built up platforms or built up land, so that going anywhere meant having a boat and boat man. It would have been much more expensive for King Monghut to have Anna Leonowens living off site, because she would have had to have both boat and servant handy at all times.

The Grand Palace in Bangkok

I should maybe shut my mouth until I have done voluminous research to make certain I make no more mistakes, but I am so excited about this research and hope to find people who know more about this area.

Research Quandaries, Biographer Battles and Anna Leonowens--which one is right?

Love that hair!

So, I'm reading two biographies of Anna Leonowens. Recent ones. And in many places, they flat-out contradict one another.

One is called Bombay Anna, The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the King and I Governess p. 2008 by Susan Morgan. (Distinguished professor of English at University of Miami.) Morgan's writing is fun (so far) In this book, Morgan presents a reasonable view of Anna's life and choices, beginning with upward-rising ancestors, proof of her grandmother's marriage, and a wild, free-range childhood where she her voracious intellect was able to inhale several languages beyond the ones she would have learned at home. She manages to make




The other is: Masked, The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the court of Siam, by Alfred Habegger, a professor emeritus, again of English, at the University of Kansas, and biographer of Henry James Sr. and Emily Dickinson. Habegger really dislikes his heroine, who he explains with great disdain,  falsified things she wrote about her own past (at a time of such bigotry against being a "half-caste," or in Anna's case, one quarter East-Indian, that it was like being a quadroon (one quarter African) while living as white in high society 1850's New Orleans.

He is also given to saying, with high dudgeon, that none of the other white people dealing with King Monghut thought he was highhanded with them, while neglecting to notice that none of the other people he's mentioning are women, and when he mentions Anna's son, Louis, who was with her in Thailand, writing of his fears of King Monghut, Habegger decides not that there might be a reason for fear in an absolute monarchy where opposition is suppressed, but that his mother's "paranoia" must have affected him. 

And he speaks in the simplest psychologicaleese, something that, in general, irritates the heck out of me. Very few things are that simple. Certainly not Anna Leonowens, King Monghut, or the politics of Siam or America or Britain during the years about which he writes. 

But he seems to have done a tremendous amount of detailed detective work and research, as does Susan Morgan. 

So what do I do when they disagree? 

And would anybody know anything about the Bombay Education Society's School during the years of, say, 1840 to 1855? If you do, I'd love to hear from you.

Would you have any idea of whether or how much an Anglo-Indian East India Army brat might encounter Mohommedans, Parsis--(Zoroastrians originally from Persia) Marathis, thugs (a tribe or gang of criminals known as thuggees, believe it or not) Nautch girls, Turban folders, gold-thread weavers, road sweepers, Brahmins and every cast between, cow patty makers, (or did Anna herself make cow patties to line the walls, burn for fuel, etc?) 

Did Anna join her mother with a group of women washing laundry in the river or lake? 

How the heck can I learn about these things? Even if I could afford to travel to India, Australia, Indonesia and Thailand, I couldn't get to 1840 Poona, a now-destroyed Australian outpost, or the brick house outside the palace from that time. 

Though why anybody who had grown up in the heat of India, lived in Australia's dry heat, and Indonesia's humidity, think that a brick house would make sense for living in in Thailand? 

Any ideas? 

Anna And the King of Siam--The reinvented helping to reinvent.

I'm still thinking about the discovery that our pale-skinned, red-haired vision of Anna Leonowens, born in Wales, daughter of a captain in the army, widow of a captain in the army, dreaming wistfully about "When the earth smelled of summer, and the sky was streaked with white, and the soft mist of England was sleeping on a hill," was really a fierce, imaginative, inventive, resilient mixed-race woman who was born in India, raised in India and Singapore, married a weak man and not only found a way to support herself throughout her life, but did so by so completely reinventing herself that she inspired the imaginations of millions of people around the world, in a story of "British civilization" taming a "barbarian." 

This is a woman who had never been to England, whose father was an enlisted man, her mother "Eurasian," in a time when that was social death, who may have grown up among the rest of the soldiers' brats, with what little schooling that entailed, and who reinvented herself not only to teach for five years, the children of the King of Siam, but later reinvented herself with a writing and speaking career, and built a far better world for her children--her daughter married well, and lived a life of leisure, probably never knowing that her great-grandmother was Indian and her mother was not from Wales. 

Anna Leonowens cut off her sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, when Eliza married James Millard, a mixed-race Sergeant-Major with the 4th Troop Artillery, Indian Army in Deesa, Banaskantha, Gujarat, India. In fact, Anna cut Eliza off so completely that she threatened to commit suicide when a family member tried to contact her. (Eliza herself died at age 

But her son, Louis Leonowens, the child of The King And I, who was educated for six years in Siam, was sent to Europe for his education, (after the Thais politely asked Anna to leave.) He returned to Thailand, and married Caroline Knox, the daughter of Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife, a Thai noblewoman--which must have been, in some ways, Anna Leonowen's greatest nightmare, that her son was marrying a woman of mixed race. 

What rich, fascinating characters, including King Monghut, who was no slouch at reinvention himself, who spoke 11 languages, was not raised to be King, was in fact, an intellectual, the successful head of a Buddhist monastery, creating a revolution in Thai Buddhism, and was a moving force in the modernization of Siam.

And then, there is Siam's acting prime minister at the time, Somdet Chao Phraya Si Suriyawong.

And Sir George Thomas Knox and his wife and children. 

And the first women doctors who came from many countries to study at the first medical school in the US to accept women. 

And. . .

Ah, research.