Winnifred Eaton (writer)

Winnifred Eaton (August 21, 1875 – April 8, 1954) was a Canadian author and screenwriter of Chinese-British ancestry. Publishing prolifically under a number of names, most predominantly, the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, she was one of the first North American writers of Asian descent to publish fiction in English.

Biography

Eaton was the daughter of an English merchant, Edward C. Eaton (1839 – 1915), and a Chinese performer, Achuen "Grace" Amoy (1846 – 1922). The two married in Shanghai in 1863 but relocated to England a year later. Over the next few years, the Eaton family moved back and forth from England to the US several times before finally relocating permanently to Montreal in 1872, where Winnifred was born.

The Eaton family was large; Winnifred was the eighth of 12 children who survived infancy. Edward Eaton struggled to support the family, who moved frequently from one lodging to the next. Nonetheless, the children were raised in an intellectually stimulating environment. Winnifred's eldest sister, Edith Maude Eaton, would become a journalist and, under the pen name Sui Sin Far, an author of stories about Chinese immigrants to the United States, and her older sister Grace Helen Eaton would marry fin-de-siècle editor Walter Blackburn Harte.

Winnifred achieved early success, publishing her first stories in Canadian and U.S. newspapers and magazines as a teenager and publishing her first novel, Miss Nume of Japan, in 1898.