MP3 Audios - Biography

"Recounts of and interactions with the royal family are delightful May keeps her tone
light and humorous."AudioFile

This is the Victorian memoir that inspired Broadway's The King and I and the newest movie,
Anna and the King, starring Jodie Foster.

The English Governess at the Siamese Court, written in 1870, vividly recounts the experiences of
one Anna Harriette Leonowens as governess for the sixty-plus children of King Mongkut of Siam, and
translator and scribe for the King himself. Bright, young, and energetic, Leonowens was well-suited to
her role and her writings convey a heartfelt interest in the lives, legends, and languages of Siam's rich
and poor.

She also tells of how she and the King often disagreed on matters domestic. After all, this was the first
time King Mongkut had met a woman who dared to contradict him, and the governess found the very idea
of male domination intolerable. Overworked and underpaid, Loenowens would eventually resign, but her
exchanges with His Majestyheated and otherwiseon topics like grammar, charity, slavery, politics, and
religion add much to her diary's rich, cross-cultural spirit and its East-meets-West appeal.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of thirteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.