Book Reviews

Abstract

Mary Chapman's edited collection of newly uncovered works by pioneering Asian North American author Edith Eaton, Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton, is a valuable contribution to the study of a major figure in early Asian American literature. Chapman's volume is an important resource for scholars from various fields, including literary studies, travel studies, ethnic studies, border studies, and women's studies, who are looking for a rare, alternative perspective from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in North America. Chapman has collected the earliest known journalism, literature, and travel writing by a North American of Asian descent, challenging assumptions about cultural commentary and travel narratives and offering a more complex, hybrid, and "transnational engagement" (lviii) with North American culture.Edith Eaton, better known by her pseudonym Sui Sin Far, is celebrated as the first Asian North American author to achieve publication. Her younger sister Winnifred Eaton also wrote under a pseudonym, Onoto Watanna, and is viewed as the first Asian North American novelist. Edith Eaton was born in England to an English father and a Chinese mother and raised primarily in Montreal, Canada. As an adult Eaton lived in various cities and towns in Canada, Jamaica, and the United States, and she wrote short fiction, poetry, journalism, and travel correspondence for a number of newspapers and literary magazines in the United States, Jamaica, and Canada.Eaton is perhaps most famous today for a collection of her work called Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks and published in 1995, which focuses on Eaton's writings Book Reviews