Winnifred
Eaton was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1875. Her father
was an Englishman who met her mother, a Chinese native,
while working as a silk merchant in Shanghai. Winnifred
was the eighth of their fourteen children. This
Asian heritage
would
provide
the fuel for her numerous and largely successful short
stories, novels, and screen plays often featuring relationships
between Asian women and white men.
pba02966 The Japanese Nightengale (Harper and Brothers 1902)
Winnifred’s first story was published in a Montreal
newspaper when she was only fourteen. She left home at
age seventeen to work for a Canadian newspaper in Jamaica.
A year later
she moved to Chicago where her first novel, Miss
Nume Of Japan (1898) was published,
giving birth to her new identity as Onoto Watanna.
Though Eaton was of English and Chinese decent, she assumed
the
persona
of
a Japanese
noblewoman - creating this fictional pen name (which was
not truly a Japanese name at all, but only Japanese-sounding)
due to the overall more positive feelings associated with
Japanese
people
over Chinese in Victorian America. Eaton/Watanna was one
of the first people of Asian heritage to have
writing
published
in the United States. Her
sister, the writer Edith Maud Eaton, also adopted an exotic
persona, but one of a Chinese woman, calling herself Sui
Sin Far or
Water Lily.
pba02967 The Heart of the Hyacinth (Harper and Brothers 1903)
After her successful
first novel, Miss Nume of Japan (1898), Winnifred
moved to New York. She found much success there publishing
several
more novels. One of these novels, A Japanese Nightingale,
was produced as a Broadway play and then made into
a motion picture. In New York she married Bertrand
Babcock and had four children. The marriage ended in
divorce
and she was later remarried to Francis Fournier. She
continued to write novels and short stories and even
worked on some screen plays later moving back to
Canada. She died in 1954 while travelling in the United
States.
Winnifred and her
sister Edith were among the first Asian women to publish
in the United States.
Winnifred Eaton as Onoto Watanna presented a new voice
and explored situations foreign in her Victorian society.
Special thanks to Dr.
John Crowley, UA Department of English for his inspiration
and donation of Watanna books, and to Dr. Edward Tang,
UA Department of American Studies for his insightful
lecture.
