Editing Anna Leonowens (section)

==Later research==
Leonowens kept the actual facts of her early life a closely guarded secret throughout her life, and never disclosed them to anybody, including her family.<ref name="Chalermsri" /> They were uncovered by researchers long after her death; their scrutiny began with her writings, especially following the popularity of the musical's 1956 film adaptation. [[D. G. E. Hall]], writing in his 1955 book ''A History of South-East Asia'', commented that Leonowens "was gifted with more imagination than insight", and from 1957 to 1961 [[A. 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". Moffat noted in his biography of King Mongkut that Leonowens "carelessly leaves proof of her transposed plagiarism".<ref>{{cite book |last1=Cheng |first1=Chu-Chueh |editor1-last=Siegel |editor1-first=Kristi |title=Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women's Travel Writing |date=2004 |publisher=Peter Lang |isbn=9780820449050 |pages=139–141 |chapter=Frances Trollope's America and Anna Leonowens's Siam}}</ref>

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.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Warren |first1=William |editor1-last=O'Reilly |editor1-first=James |editor2-last=Habegger |editor2-first=Larry |title=Travelers' Tales, Thailand: True Stories |date=2002 |publisher=Travelers' Tales |location=San Francisco |isbn=9781932361803 |pages=88–89 |chapter=Who Was Anna Leonowens?}}</ref> His findings were published in the 1976 book ''Louis and the King of Siam'', and later writers have expanded on this line of research, including Leslie Smith Dow in ''Anna Leonowens: A Life Beyond The King and I'' (1991) and Susan Kepner in her 1996 paper "Anna (and Margaret) and the King of Siam".<ref name="Chalermsri">{{cite journal |last1=Chantasingh |first1=Chalermsri |title=The Power of the Auteur: The Case of the Anna Myth (1870-1999) |journal=Journal of the Faculty of Arts, Silpakorn University |date=2006 |volume=28 |issue=Special issue 2006 |pages=74–106 |url=https://so04.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/jasu/article/view/239986}}</ref> More recent full-length scholarly biographies by Susan Morgan (''Bombay Anna'', 2008) and Alfred Habegger (''Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens, Schoolmistress at the Court of Siam'', 2014) brought widespread attention to Leonowens's actual life story.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Reynolds |first1=E. Bruce |title=Review of Masked: The Life of Anna Leonowens |work=New Mandala |date=29 September 2014 |url=https://www.newmandala.org/book-review/review-of-masked-the-life-of-anna-leonowens-tlc-nmrev-lxxviii/ |language=en-AU |access-date=13 August 2022}}</ref>