Books

First edition of this scarce narrative based on the author's early life in India. Born the daughter of a sapper sergeant in Ahmadnagar, Anna Leonowens (1831-1915) is best remembered as the author of The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870), romanticized by Margaret Landon as Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and famously adapted for stage and screen as The King and I. "Anna'sfather died before her birth, leaving the family penniless. On 9 January 1832 her mother marriedPatrick Donohoe, a corporal in the engineers, soon seconded to thepublic works departmentwhere he served successively as sergeant overseer (inDeesa), assistant supervisor (in Aden) and deputy commissary (in Poona). It is likely thatAnnafirst met the Irish-bornThomas Lean Owens (bap. 1823,d. 1859), in the mid-1840s, when he was paymaster sergeant with the28th regimentat Deesa. Her parents opposed the connection which was temporarily broken whenDonohoewas transferred to Aden in 1847, taking his by then large family with him � [following a sojourn in the Middle East she returned to India and] married'Leon' Owenson Christmas day 1849, in Poona; he was then a clerk in the commissary general's office at Bombay, but by May 1852, when their first child,Selina, died, he was employed byR. Frith & Co., Bombay mess agents. At about this timeAnnabroke completely with her family, and the couple, their surname now conflated toLeonowens, went to Perth, Western Australia" (ODNB). A glowing notice in the Unitarian Review remarked on the author's "bright, lively, and sympathetic intelligence" and that her "animated narrative" comes from a "purely human, not from a missionary judgement", concluding that it is "one of the most entertaining and instructive books of travel in the East to be found". Robinson, pp. 138-40; Theakstone, pp. 248-9. Unitarian Review, vol. XXIV, 1885. Octavo. Original brownish orange vertically combed moir� cloth, gilt-lettered spine, front covered lettered in gilt and black within an "oriental" architectural archway, greyish green surface-paper endpapers. Tissue-guarded wood-engraved frontispiece and 23 similar plates. Covers just little scuffed, bumped and marked, inner hinges slightly strained in parts, cracked at gutter of frontispiece and title page, contents toned, edges a little dusty, small damp stain to margins of plates: a very good copy.