4pp. Autograph Letter Signed anonymously (as ‘“Our Derelict” astray’). Royal Hotel, Rangoon, Burma, May 13, 1907. To Mrs. Sharp in the United States.
About the popular 1905 novel, A Marriage in Burma, which gave a thinly fictionalized account of the inter-racial marriage between Chan-Toon, nephew of the King of Burma, a British-educated legal scholar and Rangoon Judge, and the beautiful 20 year-old Irish novelist Mabel Cosgrove. The letter, probably written to the wife of an American Baptist missionary to Burma who had just returned to America, gives details not in the public record about the actual marriage, which had ended in divorce:
"Mrs. Chan Toun, who wrote the book, simply tells the tale of her own life which is known to everyone here. The ‘Moony’s she speaks of were Dear Old Jack Egan and his handsome but drunken wife. After Mrs. Chan Toun went home (the close of the book), Jack Egan died and Mrs. Egan and Daisy (Jack’s [illegitimate?] daughter) went to live with Chan [?] until he lost his practice and drifted away to Chittagong, where he died a drunkard’s death. Mrs. E. went back to Australia and Daisy when last heard of was under the protection of a Pilot at Calcutta…Mrs. Chan Toun herself is running a Burmese furniture shop in a small way in London and I believe will have a little money when the Old Man’s estates are finally settled up. She is stil a remarkably handsome woman – having a good figure and not too many scruples is said to be doing very well. As she (the Authoress) herself says there is no moral to the story – it is simply a narrative from facts – a bit bald and unconvincing, perhaps the more so because it happens to be the truth…”
As an equally lurid sequel, after the bankrupt Mrs. Chan-Toon (who sometimes called herself “Princess”) returned to England and later sailed to America, she was arrested in Mexico for blackmail, again returned to England, where she was jailed for theft, and, before disappearing from public view, apparently forged a play she claimed was written for her by Oscar Wilde,