ISBN: 9780252021138

Hardback, [PU: University of Illinois Press], This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times. … More...

Hardback, [PU: University of Illinois Press], 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, Biography: General<

ISBN: 9780252021138

Hardback, [PU: University of Illinois Press], The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in the United Kingdom in 1865. Her family moved to Que… More...

Hardback, [PU: University of Illinois Press], The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in the United Kingdom 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, Eaton 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 settled in the United States, where she published her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Annette White-Parks offers the first full-length biography of the woman now remembered as North America's first published Asian writer. White-Parks reveals an author who defied the in vogue style of "yellow peril" literature to show Chinatowns and their inhabitants as complex, feeling human beings. Her insider's sympathy focused in particular on Chinese American women and children. Confronted with social divisions and discrimination, Sui Sin Far experimented with trickster characters and irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization forced on them because of their race, gender, or class., Biography: General<