Finding Edith Eaton

Abstract

Since her critical recovery in the early 1980s, Maude has been celebrated as the first Asian North American writer and as an early, authentic Eurasian voice countering yellow peril discourse through sympathetic literary representations of diasporic Chinese subjects. Eaton, a half-Chinese, half-English writer who wrote under variants of the pseudonym Sin is best known for Mrs. Spring Fragrance, her 1912 collection of Chinatown stories, and for the stories and uncollected journalism reissued in the 1995 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Recent discoveries of unknown works by made by Martha J. Cutter, Dominika Ferens, and June Howard have begun to complicate our scholarly understanding of both her biography and her oeuvre. Late one night in 2006, I typed Eaton's name and her best-known pseudonyms (Sui Sin Far and Sui Seen Fah) into the search bar of Google Books. Instantly, a link came up (one that is, alas, no longer there) to a story signed Edith Eaton that appeared in the April 1909 issue of Bohemian Magazine. Alaska Widow is not mentioned in Ferens's detailed bibliography, in Annette White-Parks's biography, or in the collection White-Parks co-edited with Amy Ling. It is also uncharacteristic of Eaton's works. Unlike the stories collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, many of which are set in North American Chinatowns and/or feature Eurasian children, this story takes up the cultural dynamic produced by the Alaska gold rush and the Spanish-American War, and it features a child born to a Native American mother abandoned by a Caucasian adventurer father who later dies in the Philippines. Alaska Widow is also unlike most of the works published after 1898 in that it is signed Edith Eaton without any parenthetical reference to her pen name. Because Alaska Widow is so different from other works by Eaton, it made me wonder: How many other unknown stories by exist, and how might they challenge scholars' understanding of the author? In the years actively published (1888-1914), US print culture changed profoundly. The number of newspapers and periodicals quadrupled. While nascent mass newspapers cultivated advertising dollars by becoming politically neutral and purportedly objective, many periodicals marketed themselves to niche audiences organized by class, age, gender, aesthetics, vocation, and other categories. Together Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Ind Other Writings have made available to scholars only about fifty (mostly Chinatown-themed) publications by Eaton. My archival research, combined with contributions from other scholars, including Cutter, Ferens, and Howard, has uncovered nearly two hundred additional texts of diverse genres, themes, styles, and politics published in more than forty different Canadian, United States, and Jamaican periodicals between 1888 and 1914. (1) In her early career, between 1888 and 1896, placed signed poetry and fiction in small-circulation Montreal publications such as the Dominion Illustrated and Metropolitan Magazine. She also filed regular, unsigned journalistic contributions (primarily about Montreal's Chinatown) and sent impassioned letters to the editor (signing herself E. E.) about racist policies toward the Chinese in Canada to two local newspapers: the Montreal Daily Witness and Montreal Daily Star. In addition, she filed stories about smallpox outbreaks, fires, and murders from northern Ontario, where she worked as a stenographer from 1892 to 1893. Between 1896 and 1897 she wrote daily society and women's page news for Jamaica's Gall's Daily Newsletter. But recognized early on that it would be almost impossible to earn a living publishing fiction in Canada. In 1896, therefore, she began to submit Chinatown stories, signed Sui Seen Far, to periodicals in the United States--the fin de siecle little magazines Fly Leaf and Lotus, as well as the regional emigration magazine Land of Sunshine and popular magazine Short Stories. …