The Winnifred Eaton Archive is a research and teaching tool that offers over 200 works by Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (1875-1954). Winnifred Eaton was a popular early Asian North American author, journalist, screenwriter and playwright whose best known works were published under the pen-name “Onoto Watanna,” a controversial persona that she assumed for over two decades. She was also the sister of Edith Eaton (“Sui Sin Far”). Drawing on the resources of libraries and special collections from around the world, this digital archive provides freely accessible scans and fully searchable transcriptions of much of Winnifred Eaton’s collected oeuvre. Our goal is to provide a more complete picture of this complex and problematic figure. The archive will expand as Eaton’s known oeuvre expands. It also houses supplemental materials: photographs, reviews, illustrations, a biography, a bibliography, and unpublished manuscripts. Read More

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• Butchering BrainsWhile researching the biography of my grandmother Onoto Watanna, I was particularly struck by this vivid account of famous writers being imported into Hollywood. How little attitudes and practices have changed! “Butchering Brains” is a vital and sometimes hilarious window into the past, all the more for being laced with the corroding professional resentments engendered by such an atmosphere. Read More Written by Diana Birchall
• Li Ching’s Baby“Li Ching’s Baby,” although one of the earliest texts signed “Onoto Watanna,” is set in a Canadian Chinatown and features characters and themes typically associated with the works of Winnifred Eaton’s sister, Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far). When his Chinese bride gives birth to a stillborn, a Chinese businessman and smuggler pays his former French-Canadian lover to replace it, while his wife is sleeping, with a baby stolen from her white employer. Read More Written by Mary Chapman
• Marion (Part 4)Isn’t it curious that Hearst’s synopsis of the serial novel claims that Marion’s mother is a “Frenchwoman” when the first instalment begins with Marion’s mother’s foreignness being whispered about by French Montrealers? But perhaps it’s unsurprising; this was the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act and fierce prejudice against the Chinese, and Marion, after all, is our beautiful heroine! You would never know, reading this instalment, that the route taken across the border by the “real” Marion—Winnifred Eaton’s sister Sara Eaton Bosse—was fraught with danger, or that her beau’s reluctance to marry her had to do with anything more than her financial status! Read More Written by Karen Skinazi
• Wild RoseIn many respects, Eaton’s draft screenplay of “Wild Rose” reads like a short story that aims to portray Alberta as a prominent character, with the title recalling both the province’s provincial flower and the screenplay’s protagonist. Accordingly, the plot Eaton maps out is a picturesque and uniquely Canadian interpretation of classic American western tropes—one example being her substitution of Northwest Mounted Police for the sheriffs, Pinkerton agents, and cavalry officers who typically pursue outlaws in the American “Wild West.” The preliminary state of Eaton’s draft is evident in her characterization of the Forest Ranger, whose last name changes from Rowan to Kenyon without explanation. Perhaps the name “Kenyon” plays on the name of fictional lumberjack Paul Bunyan, first popularized in 1916. Read More Written by Samantha Bowen
• A ProtestThe conflict between two writers in Calgary’s small literary community played out on a national stage over several issues of Canadian Bookman in early 1924. Laura Goodman Salverson and her allies responded to Eaton Reeve’s protest with counter-statements and eventually an affidavit. Eaton Reeve retreated. “I should not have allowed what I thought was an unkind and ungrateful act on her part toward me to have hurt me. Few of us can rise above our personalities.” Read More Written by Shaun Hunter
• A Neighbor’s Garden, My Own, and a Dream One (Part 1)“A Neighbor’s Garden,” published while Eaton was living on Long Island, details her love of flowers as well as the trials of the work involved in homemaking. Illustrative of the New York years during which she worked to reinvent herself, it is also an example of Eaton’s orchestration of identity. While presented as autobiographical nonfiction, the text is credited to her Japanese pseudonym and many of its ‘autobiographical’ details—“the flowering land of Japan which had been [my mother’s] home” (347)--are fiction. Eaton uses the autobiographical genre to fashion the character/self of “Onoto Watanna” and thus the text is simultaneously self-revealing and self-obscuring. Read More Written by Daisy Couture
• Taro“Taro” prefigures Eaton’s interest in reversing conventional narrative patterns established in Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthème (1887) and John Luther Long’s Madame Butterfly (1898). In those earlier works, white men traveling to Japan from the West marry Japanese women only to abandon them shortly thereafter. In “Taro,” the roles are reversed. A young white woman is engaged to the titular character, a Japanese man studying in the United States, who leaves her for a Japanese bride shortly after returning home. Notably, this story also features two names (Yuki and Taro) that will appear in A Japanese Nightingale (1901), probably Winnifred Eaton’s best-known work. Read More Written by Spencer Tricker