Landon, Margaret (Dorothea Mortenson)

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LANDON, Margaret (Dorothea Mortenson)

Born 3 September 1903, Somers, Wisconsin; died 4 December 1993

Daughter of Annenus D. and Adelle Estbourg Mortenson; married Kenneth P. Landon, 1926

Margaret Landon received her B.A. degree from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1925. While teaching Latin and English in Bear Lake, Wisconsin, Landon felt that perhaps she had chosen the wrong career. She did, however, continue her interest in education after her marriage to a Presbyterian missionary (who later was associate dean of area and language studies at the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute). After a one-year stay in Bangkok, largely spent in learning the language, the Landons were stationed in Siam (now Thailand) from 1927 to 1937. Landon was principal of the Trang Girls' School there for five years.

The Asian experience led to writings by her husband such as Southeast Asia (1949) and to her own novels, Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and Never Dies the Dream (1949).

Anna and the King of Siam is the story of Anna Leonowens, a spirited Welsh woman who, in the 1860s, became secretary to Siam's King Mongkut and governess to his 60-plus children and his favorite concubines. Landon based the story on two books of memoirs by Mrs. Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872), but she supplemented this information with her own research in Siamese books and documents in the Library of Congress and in consular records in the National Archives. In addition, Landon was able to meet Mrs. Leonowens's granddaughter, who gave her diaries, letters, and other family materials. This novel, Landon's best-known work, appeals to the reader through its descriptions of the unusual nature of the household, the exotic setting of the palace of Siam, and the spunky character of the heroine, who bravely speaks out on freedom and individual rights to her employer.

Anna and the King of Siam was a bestseller and has been translated into many languages. The hit musical comedy The King and I was first produced in 1951 but has been an international success on stage with many revivals in the 1970s and '80s, as well the most recent in the late 1990s. The original movie version of the novel also had much success, and it, too, was remade in the late 1990s, along with an animated version on video.

Rheumatic fever in 1946 interfered with Landon's writing for an extended period of time, but in 1949 she published Never Dies the Dream, a novel which seems to be drawn largely from her own mission-teaching experience in Bangkok. The heroine is India Severn, a native of Chicago and missionary for 25 years. She is head of Jasmine Hall, a mission school for girls that she established 11 years before the story begins in 1930. Attitudes toward education for women provide interest in this tale of a land where, in the 19th century, the proverb "Teach a buffalo before a woman" was commonly accepted. The most successful aspect of Never Dies the Dream is the delineation of setting. It provides the reader with a strong sense of having been in Bangkok along with the characters. Landon uses intimate details drawn from her own stay there to give a realistic dimension to the fictional scene.

The great success of Anna and the King of Siam was not duplicated by Landon's second novel. For a number of years, she worked on a history of Southeast Asia in the colonial period, which remains unpublished. Had ill health not interfered, Landon might well have published much more. Her two novels, however, stand as worthwhile literary contributions in their examination of cultural differences and as adventure tales.

Bibliography:

Lehmann, J. D., Landon Family History: Descendants of Samuel and Margaret Landon of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and Descendants of Daniel and Ann Landon of Greenwood, Nebraska, 1727-1987 (1988).