Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the Court of Siam

Older readers may remember Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne's performances in Twentieth Century Fox's 1946 film Anna and the King of Siam. More will recall Rodgers and Hammerstein's subsequent Broadway version, The King and I, starring Yul Brynner and Gertrude Lawrence. That musical gained Brynner an Oscar when Twentieth Century Fox filmed it in 1956, this time with Deborah Kerr in the role of governess Anna Leonowens. Hollywood returned to the story in 1999, with Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-fat taking the leading roles. All these versions differ, but at their heart is the same uplifting tale, that of a plucky Christian English governess alone in the Siamese court, battling fearlessly for her principles against the barbarous, pagan autocracy and an exotically masculine king, and in the end leading Thailand along the path to reform and the abolition of slavery. This was the story that emerged from Margaret Landon's supposedly non-fictional account, Anna and the King of Siam, published in 1944 as the U.S. assumed the white man's burden at the end of the Second World War, and so well-timed to gain acclaim and a very wide readership.