Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (Asian American Experience)

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American
fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times.
The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude
Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she
was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve
siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist,
and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far
(Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912,
in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has
been out of print since 1914.
Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature
and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns,
not in the mode of the "yellow peril" literature in vogue at
the time but with an insider's sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American
women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination
that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools
of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled
to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender
consigned them in that era.
"Superbly researched, thoughtfully reasoned, and beautifully written.
. . . Will be the foundation for all future work on Sui Sin Far."
-- Elizabeth Ammons, author of Conflicting Stories: American Women
Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century