Winnifred Eaton
Winnifred Eaton, also known by her pen name Onoto Watanna, was an influential author born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1875, who made significant contributions to early twentieth-century literature by blending Japanese and North American cultures. The eighth of fourteen children, she grew up in a challenging environment, which fueled her ambition to write. Eaton initially gained prominence as a journalist before publishing her first novel, *Miss Numè of Japan*, in 1899, which marked the beginning of her successful writing career. Under the Onoto Watanna name, she crafted romantic novels often featuring strong-willed Asian female characters, tackling themes of cross-cultural relationships and identity.
Her works gained widespread popularity, with titles like *A Japanese Nightingale* being adapted for the stage. Despite a decline in recognition after World War II, recent scholarship has reevaluated her contributions, highlighting her unique perspective as a biracial author and her ability to address complex social issues. Eaton's storytelling blended imaginative narratives with a keen awareness of the racial and gender dynamics of her time, making her a pioneering figure in Asian American literature. She passed away in Montana in 1954, leaving behind a legacy that continues to resonate with modern readers.
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Subject Terms
Winnifred Eaton
Canadian-born Chinese American novelist, playwright, and writer
- Born: August 21, 1875
- Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Died: April 8, 1954
- Place of death: Butte, Montana
Winnifred Eaton was a Canadian-born woman of Chinese and English descent who followed in the footsteps of her elder sister, Edith Maude Eaton, in becoming a writer. Adopting a Japanese persona and pen name, she published numerous stories, novels, essays, and screenplays while becoming one of North America’s first successful fiction authors of Asian descent.
Areas of achievement: Literature, theater, philanthropy
Early Life
Lillie Winifred Eaton was the eighth of fourteen children. Her father was British-born merchant Edward Eaton, a representative for his family’s silk trade. While in Shanghai on business in 1863, the twenty-four-year-old married Grace Trefusis, a seventeen-year-old English-educated Chinese orphan raised by missionaries. The couple returned to England, where Eaton’s father disinherited him. Struggling to survive as a landscape painter in the town of Macclesfield, Edward Eaton moved his family to North America in 1872 in hopes of improving his prospects. They eventually settled in Montreal, Quebec, where Winnifred was born in 1875.
Ambitious and romantic, Winnifred Eaton hated the squalor and harsh poverty of her life. At age fourteen, she published her first article in a Montreal newspaper. In 1896, she worked for Gall’s News Letter as a correspondent in Kingston, Jamaica. A year later, she became a reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune. She soon afterward moved to Chicago for four years and contributed articles and essays to numerous magazines and newspapers. Her first fiction works appeared in the late 1890s in the popular magazine Ladies’ Home Journal.
By then, her older sister Edith had also been published, writing under the Chinese pseudonym Sui Sin Far. To set herself apart from Edith, avoid rampant anti-Chinese sentiment that arose following the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and take advantage of pro-Japanese feelings at the time, Eaton created a new identity as a part-Japanese woman. She began writing under the name Onoto Watanna, which is not in fact Japanese at all.
Life’s Work
As Onoto Watanna, Eaton published her first novel, Miss Numè of Japan, in 1899. The book established what would become a pattern for much of her fiction in which a Japanese woman typically becomes romantically involved with a Westerner. The book became a best seller, swept up in the wake of Madame Butterfly, an 1898 short story that became a popular play and opera depicting an East-West love story. Dozens of Watanna stories and articles appeared in periodicals over the next several years.
In 1901, Eaton moved to New York City. She wrote for Munsey’s Magazine, a popular monthly. She married Bertram Babcock, became the mother of four children, and was absorbed into a local literary circle that included the likes of writers Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton. Eaton followed up her initial success with additional Onoto Watanna novels, most of them romances about strong-willed Asian women; she also wrote a memoir, Me: A Book ofRemembrance (1915), and cowrote a Chinese-Japanese cookbook in 1914. Virtually all of Eaton’s longer works were commercially successful. A Japanese Nightingale (1901) was adapted as a Broadway play. Other novels set Japan included The Wooing of Wisteria (1902), The Heart of Hyacinth (1903), The Love of Azelea (1904), Tama (1910), and Sunny-San (1922). In addition to novels that drew on her Asian heritage, Eaton wrote the Irish-tinged Diary of Delia (1907), Cattle (1924), and His Royal Nibs (1925).
In 1917, Eaton divorced Babcock. She later married Calgary oilman-cattleman Francis “Frank” Fournier Reeve. While he remained in Canada to run various enterprises, she continued her career in New York. Between 1926 and 1931, she lived in California, where she wrote for such films as Phantom of the Opera (1925), Showboat (1929), Shanghai Lady (1929), Undertow (1930), and East Is West (1930). Eaton went on to reside in Calgary, Alberta, in comfortable retirement as a patron of the arts: She and her husband sponsored a theater at the University of Calgary. At age seventy-eight, she fell ill and died in Montana while in transit from California.
Significance
An early twentieth-century celebrity author, Winnifred Eaton enjoyed recognition for her colorful literature that blended Japanese and North American culture. After World War II, her work fell out of favor and eventually out of print. Though her imagination and storytelling skills were never questioned, her fiction was occasionally dismissed as formulaic, melodramatic, and stereotypical, incorporating extensive use of dialect in dialogue.
However, late twentieth-century critics revisiting Eaton’s work have found much to admire in the writing of Onoto Watanna, now considered a groundbreaking Asian American author. Modern readers can appreciate her smart, adaptable heroines; her skillful use of well-researched detail (though she often sacrificed facts to illustrate broader truths); and her unexpected plot reversals. Her technique in dealing with cross-cultural issues and themes—such as discrimination, interracial relationships, and biracial children—in fiction was unique for her time and is still relevant in the twenty-first century. Even as she exploited the prejudices of the era and her own mixed heritage for success, Eaton subtly worked to subvert racial, national, and gender myths.
Bibliography
Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2006. Print. A detailed, intimate biography of Winnifred Eaton and a history of the age in which she lived and worked, as told by her granddaughter, a film analyst and historical novelist.
Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2002. Print. Examines Eaton’s work and character in the context of her status as a woman and a member of a racial minority, demonstrating the necessity of her use of stereotypes in order to survive as a popular writer.
Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. A comparison of the lives and work of the two Eaton sisters, who pursued two widely divergent methods—and experienced very different reception—of achieving success as female minority writers in early twentieth-century America.