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Winnifred Eaton (writer)

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Winnifred Eaton
Winnifred Eaton c. 1903
Winnifred Eaton c. 1903
Born(1875-08-21)August 21, 1875
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
DiedApril 8, 1954(1954-04-08) (aged 78)
Butte, Montana, USA
Pen nameOnoto Watanna
Period1899–1932
Genrenovelist, screenwriter
Notable worksTama (1910)
Me, A Book of Remembrance
RelativesEdith Maude Eaton, sister

Winnifred Eaton was a Canadian author and screenwriter of Chinese-British ancestry.[1] She published under a number of names,[2] most predominantly, the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, under which she attained early success writing stories and novels about Japan and the Japanese.[3]

Biography

Eaton was the daughter of an English merchant, Edward Eaton, and Achuen "Grace" Amoy, who had performed and toured in the "Chinese Magicians" acrobatic troupe.[4] The two married in Shanghai in 1863 but relocated to England a year later.[5] Over the next few years, the Eaton family moved back and fourth from England to New York several times before finally relocating permanently to Montreal in 1872, where Winnifred was born.[6]

The Eaton family was large; Winnifred was the eighth of 12 children who survived infancy.[7] 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.[8] 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.[9]

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. She would eventually publish over a dozen novels and dozens of short stories and articles.[10]

While living in New York City, Eaton met journalist Bertrand Babcock, the son of Emma Whitcomb Babcock and Charles Almanzo Babcock. The two married in 1901[11] and had four children, three sons and a daughter; Perry, the oldest, died as a child. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1917, and in the same year, Eaton married Francis Fournier Reeve.[12] Moving to Alberta in her native Canada, Eaton ranched with her husband while continuing to write fiction and journalism, mostly with an Albertan focus, until she returned to New York in 1924 to write screenplays for the burgeoning film industry at Universal Studios. In 1925, she moved to Hollywood to lead Universal Studio's scenario department.

In 1932, Eaton returned to Calgary, where she became an active member of the artistic community, founding the Little Theatre Movement and serving as the president of the Calgary branch of the Canadian Authors' Association.[5]

In 1954, while returning home from a vacation in California, Eaton fell ill and died of heart failure in Butte, Montana.[11] Following her death, her husband donated funds to build the Reeve Theatre at the University of Calgary.[13]

Literary career

Eaton claimed to be only 14 when one of her stories was accepted for publication by a Montreal newspaper that had already published pieces by her sister. In fact, she was almost 20 when her story "A Poor Devil" was published in Metropolitan Magazine. Eaton left home at age 20 to take a job as a stenographer for a newspaper in Kingston, Jamaica. She remained there for less than a year, then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and then Chicago, Illinois, where for a time she worked as a typist while continuing to write short stories.[5] Eventually, her compositions were accepted by the prestigious Saturday Evening Post as well as by other popular periodicals. She published her first novel, Miss Nume of Japan capitalizing on her mixed ancestry to pass herself off as a Japanese American by the name of Onoto Watanna (which sounds Japanese but is not Japanese at all).

In 1900, Eaton moved to New York City, where her second major novel, A Japanese Nightingale, was published. It proved extremely successful, being translated into several languages and eventually adapted both as a Broadway play and then, in 1918, as a motion picture. Her novel Tama (1910) was a runaway bestseller and her novel Me, A Book of Remembrance, a thinly disguised memoir, told a titillating tale of a woman's infidelities. Under her Japanese pseudonym, Eaton published many romance novels and short stories and journalistic works that were widely read throughout the United States. Over the course of her 40-year career, Eaton also had articles published in many popular magazines in the United States, including the Ladies' Home Journal and Harper's Monthly.

Poster for Klaw & Erlanger's production of A Japanese Nightingale in New York in 1903

In collaboration with her sister Sara Eaton Bosse, Eaton published the Chinese-Japanese Cookbook in 1914. The authors preface their history of Asian food and a representative selection of recipes with the reassurance that "When it is known how simple and clean are the ingredients used to make up these oriental dishes, the Westerner will cease to feel that natural repugnance which assails one when about to taste a strange dish of a new and strange land."[14]

After marrying Frank Reeve and moving to Alberta, Eaton continued to write fiction and journalism, mostly with an Albertan focus. She returned to New York in 1924 to work in the burgeoning film industry, and in 1925, she moved to Hollywood to lead Universal Studio's scenario department. She is credited on six films, all produced by Universal; her work on many others remains uncredited.[15]

Eaton's publications, including all her novels, have been collected in the Winnifred Eaton Archive.

Partial bibliography

  • His Royal Nibs (1925)
  • Cattle (1923)
  • Sunny-San (1922) [16]
  • Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model (1916)
  • Me: A Book of Remembrance (1915)
  • Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (with Sara Eaton Bosse, 1914)
  • The Honorable Miss Moonlight (1912)
  • Tama (novel) (1910)
  • Diary of Delia (1907)
  • Daughters of Nijo (1907) [17]
  • A Japanese Blossom (1906)
  • The Love of Azalea (1904) [18]
  • The Heart of Hyacinth (1903) [19]
  • A Japanese Nightingale (1902)[20]
  • The Wooing of Wisteria (1902) [21]
  • Miss Nume of Japan (1899) [22]

Adapted from the article Winnifred Eaton, from Wikinfo, licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Selected filmography

See also

References

  1. ^ Diana Birchall, Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton, U of Illinois P, 2001, ISBN 0-252-02607-1, p.4.
  2. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee (March 13, 2022). "Pseudonyms used by Winnifred Eaton". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. Retrieved December 5, 2022.
  3. ^ Birchall, Diana (2005). "Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)". Asian American Writers – via Gale Cengage.
  4. ^ Chapman, Mary (2016). Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. pp. xvi. ISBN 978-0-7735-4721-6.
  5. ^ a b c Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee (March 13, 2022). "Biographical Timeline". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. Retrieved December 5, 2022.
  6. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee (March 13, 2022). "Biographical Timeline". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. Retrieved December 5, 2022.
  7. ^ Birchall, Diana (2002). Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 4–5.
  8. ^ Birchall, Diana (2002). Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 11–15.
  9. ^ Birchall, Diana (2002). Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. University of Illinois Press. p. 20.
  10. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee (March 13, 2022). "The Winnifred Eaton Archive". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. Retrieved December 5, 2022.
  11. ^ a b Birchall, Diana (2002). Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. p. 201. ISBN 9780252026072.
  12. ^ Birchall, Diana (2002). Onoto Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. University of Illinois Press. p. 130.
  13. ^ "Reeve Theatre Built History". University of Calgary Archives and Special Collections. Retrieved December 5, 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  14. ^ (Chicago: Rand McNally, c1914)Available online [1].
  15. ^ Cole, Jean Lee (2002). The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. pp. 195–197. ISBN 9780813530871.
  16. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. ""Sunny-San"". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  17. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "Daughters of Nijo". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  18. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "The Love of Azalea". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  19. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "The Heart of Hyacinth". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  20. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "A Japanese Nightingale". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  21. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "The Wooing of Wistaria". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
  22. ^ Chapman, Mary; Cole, Jean Lee. "Miss Nume of Japan". The Winnifred Eaton Archive. University of British Columbia. Retrieved December 1, 2020.
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