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.

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Anna Leonowens

Writer