Irving Wallace - The Twenty-Seventh Wife

By Irving Wallace

A Crossroad Press Production

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

Crossroad Press Edition published 2019

Original publication by Simon and Schuster1961

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The author with his daughter, Amy

Irving Wallace was born March 19, 1916 in Chicago, Illinois. He began writing for various magazines at age 15 and worked as a screenwriter for a number of Hollywood studiosColumbia, Fox, Warner Brothers, Universal, and MGM from 1950 to 1959, then he turned solely to writing books. His first major bestseller was The Chapman Report in 1960, a fictional account of a sexual research teams investigations of a wealthy Los Angeles suburb. Among other fictional works by Wallace are The Prize and The Word. His meticulously researched fiction often has the flavor of spicy journalism. A great deal of research went into his novels, which cover a wide variety of subjects, from the presentation of the Nobel Prize to political scenarios. With their recurring dramatic confrontations, his novels lend themselves well to screenplay adaptation, and most of them have been filmed, including The Chapman Report and The Prize. Wallace also compiled several nonfiction works with his family, including The Peoples Almanac and The Book of Lists, both of which have spawned sequels. Irving Wallace died June 29, 1990 in Los Angeles, California at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer.

This book and the other digital editions in the Irving Wallace collection from Crossroad Press are published in cooperation with his heirs.

Crossroad Press Titles by Irving Wallace

The Almighty

The Celestial Bed

The Chapman Report

The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Times of P.T. Barnum

The Fan Club

The Golden Room

The Guest of Honor

The Man

The Miracle

The Pigeon Project

The Plot

The Prize

The R Document

The Second Lady

The Seven Minutes

The Seventh Secret

The Three Sirens

The Two

The Word

Crossroad Press Titles by Amy Wallace

Desire

The Prodigy

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For Sylvia

A Singular Wife

And Her Parents Rose and Harry Kahn

Not far from this is another semicircular space surrounded by a high walland here stands the city of the Nang Harm, or Veiled Women. In this city live none but women and children. Here the houses of the royal princesses, the wives, concubines, and relatives of the king Into this inmost city no man is permitted to enter, except only the king.

The Romance of the Harem, by Mrs. Anna H. Leonowens, 1873

I am conscious that my narrative savours of incredibility: the fault is in the subject, not in the narrator.

The City of the Saints, by Richard F. Burton, 1861

Table of Contents

Would you think that they could abduct me from here?

Ann Eliza Young

I t is a curious fact of history that 1873the year during which Ulysses S. Grant began his second term as President of the United States, financial panic bankrupted 5,000 businesses, yellow fever decimated the South, William Boss Tweed was convicted of fraud, and the cable car was introduced to San Franciscowas also the year in which a majority of Americans were fascinated, agitated, or otherwise preoccupied with the subject of life in a harem. For this strange absorption, two young ladies were largely responsibleone being a woman born in Wales who had spent five years in a Siamese harem, and the other being a woman born in Illinois who had spent four years in a United States harem.

The English authority on seraglio living was Mrs. Anna H. Leonowens. In 1873 her unusual book, The Romance of the Harem, was published by James R. Osgood and Company in Boston. Only three years earlier, Mrs. Leonowens had made a small but solid reputation with her first book The English Governess at the Siamese Court, the story of which would become better known in the next century as Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I. After her husband had died in India, the twenty-seven-year-old Mrs. Leonowens had accepted the job of tutor to the sixty-seven children of King Mongut of Muang Thai, or Siam. In her first book Mrs. Leonowens had narrated her adventures of five years in the barbaric court of a benevolent tyrant. Now, encouraged by her friends, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, she undertook in her second book to reveal the details of the Siamese kings harem of 9,000 wives and concubines and to discuss the thirty wives and mistresses who were the mothers of his vast brood of children.

Polygamy-or, properly speaking, concubinageand slavery are the curses of the country, Mrs. Leonowens wrote in 1873. And then she added: The number of concubines is limited only by the means of the man. As the king is the source of all wealth and influence, dependent kings, princes, and nobles, and all who would seek the royal favor, vie with each other in bringing their most beautiful and accomplished daughters to the royal harem Woman is the slave of man.

This Victorian exposure of Siamese polygamy, although less widely read than Jules Vernes then current Around the World in Eighty Days, created heated discussions among its American readers. For these readers knew, as almost all Americans knew, that under their very noses, a short train ride away in the mountain fastness of the Territory of Utah, more than 10 percent of a large and growing colony of fellow American citizens were openly practicing a similar polygamy and that the Vermont-born leader of this colony had twenty-seven wives and fifty-six children. Modern Mohammedanism, Frances E. Willard, the temperance crusader, would write in Chicago, has its Mecca at Salt Lake.