Anna Harriette Leonowens (born Ann Hariett Emma Edwards;[1] 5 November 1831 – 19 January 1915) was an Anglo-Indian or Indian-born British[2] travel writer, educator, and social activist.

[7] According to biographer Susan Morgan, the only viable explanation for the complete and deliberate lack of information regarding Glascott's wife in official British records is that she "was not European".

[citation needed] For most of her adult life, Anna Leonowens had no contact with her family and took pains to disguise her origins by claiming that she had been born with the surname "Crawford" in Caernarfon, Wales, and giving her father's rank as captain.

[10] Anna attended the Bombay Education Society's girls school in Byculla (now a neighbourhood of Mumbai) that admitted "mixed-race" children whose military fathers were either dead or absent.

[13] On 24 April 1845, Anna's 15-year-old sister, Eliza Julia Edwards, married James Millard, a sergeant-major with the 4th Troop Artillery, Indian Army in Deesa.

One of their sons, William Henry Pratt, born 23 November 1887 upon their return to London, was better known by his stage name of Boris Karloff; Anna was thus his great-aunt.

[16] Anna Edwards never approved of her sister's marriage, and her self-imposed separation from the family was so complete that, a decade later, when Eliza contacted her during her stay in Siam, she replied by threatening suicide if she persisted.

[18][19] Anna Edwards's husband-to-be, Thomas Leon Owens, an Irish Protestant from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, went to India with the 28th Regiment of Foot in 1843.

[21] However, her mother and stepfather objected to the relationship, as the suitor had poor prospects for gainful employment, and had been temporarily downgraded from sergeant to private for an unspecified offense.

[28]: 21–24 The Leonowens family left Australia abruptly in April 1857, sailing to Singapore,[28]: 24  and then moving to Penang, where Thomas found work as a hotel keeper.

[34] To support her surviving daughter Avis and son Louis, Leonowens again took up teaching and opened a school for the children of British officers in Singapore.

[35] In 1862, Leonowens accepted an offer made by the consul in Singapore, Tan Kim Ching, to teach the wives and children of Mongkut, King of Siam.

[citation needed] In 1868, Leonowens was on leave for her health in England and had been negotiating a return to the court on better terms when Mongkut fell ill and died.

[37] She expanded her articles into two volumes of memoirs, beginning with The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870),[38] which earned her immediate fame but also brought charges of sensationalism.

In her writing, she casts a critical eye over court life; the account is not always a flattering one, and has become the subject of controversy in Thailand, and she has also been accused of exaggerating her influence with the king.

[42] Leonowens was a feminist, and in her writings she tended to focus on what she saw as the subjugated status of Siamese women, including those sequestered within the Nang Harm, or royal harem.

The sequel, Romance of the Harem (1873),[43] incorporates tales based on palace gossip, including the king's alleged torture and execution of one of his concubines, Tuptim.

[47][48][49][50] The New York Times reported: "Mrs. Leonowens' purpose is to awaken an interest, and enlist sympathies, in behalf of missionary labors, particularly in their relation to the destiny of Asiatic women.

"[47] She joined the literary circles of New York and Boston and made the acquaintance of local lights on the lecture circuit, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book whose anti-slavery message Leonowens had brought to the attention of the royal household.

[52] In 1878, Leonowens's daughter Avis Annie Crawford Connybeare married Thomas Fyshe, a Scottish banker and the cashier (general manager) of the Bank of Nova Scotia in Halifax, where she resided for nineteen years as she continued to travel the world.

[54][55] On behalf of The Youth's Companion magazine, Leonowens visited Russia in 1881, shortly after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and other European countries, and continued to publish travel articles and books.

From his marriage to Caroline Knox—a daughter of Sir Thomas George Knox, the British consul-general in Bangkok, and his Thai wife, Prang Yen[58]—he had two children, aged two and five years.

[65] In 1946, Talbot Jennings and Sally Benson adapted it into the screenplay for a dramatic film of the same name, starring Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison.

In response, Thai authors Seni and Kukrit Pramoj wrote their own account in 1948 and sent it to American politician and diplomat Abbot Low Moffat (1901–1996), who drew on it for his biography Mongkut, the King of Siam (1961).

[70] The humorous depiction of Mongkut as a polka-dancing despot, as well as the king's and Anna's apparent romantic feelings for each other, is condemned as disrespectful in Thailand, where the Rodgers and Hammerstein film and musical were banned by the government.

In the same year, Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat starred in a new feature-length cinematic adaptation of Leonowens's books, also titled Anna and the King.

[76] Leonowens appears as a character in Paul Marlowe's novel Knights of the Sea, in which she travels from Halifax to Baddeck in 1887 to take part in a campaign to promote women's suffrage during a by-election.

B. Griswold published several articles and a monograph sharply criticizing her depictions of King Mongkut and Siam, writing that "she would seize on a lurid story that appealed to her... remove it from its context and transpose it to Bangkok in the 1860's; and... re-write it with a wealth of circumstantial detail".

[78] The fact that Leonowens's claimed birth in Caernarfon was fabricated was first uncovered by W. S. Bristowe, an arachnologist and frequent visitor to Thailand, who was researching a biography of her son Louis.

Bristowe failed to locate Louis's certificate of birth in London (as claimed by Anna), prompting further research that led to him identifying her origins in India.