About

The Winnifred Eaton Archive is an accessible, fully searchable, digital scholarly edition of the collected works of Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve, best known for the popular Japanese romances she signed “Onoto Watanna.” It comprises page images and transcriptions of over 300 located publications and manuscripts, as well as supplemental materials that will aid students and scholars of Eaton’s work. Ultimately, it aims to collect all known publications, manuscripts, and films by Eaton in one location.

The original Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive was created by Jean Lee Cole (Loyola University Maryland) in 2004 in conjunction with the University of Virginia E-text Center. It contained edited transcriptions of two serialized novels and dozens of periodical publications held in the Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds at the University of Calgary and/or discovered by Cole over the previous decade through manual searching. These texts were encoded using the Textual Encoding Initiative P4 schema. These texts are still available in the UVa Text Collection accessible through the University of Virginia Libraries’ VIRGO catalog.

In the Winnifred Eaton Archive’s second phase, Mary Chapman (University of British Columbia), together with her research team in collaboration with Cole, updated Cole’s original archive to conform with the Textual Encoding Initiative P5 schema and added edited encoded transcriptions of dozens of additional periodical publications she discovered, as well as additional manuscripts held in the Winnifred Eaton Reeve Fonds. Chapman also added to the site biographical information, a bibliography, a timeline, a list of pseudonyms, a copy of a film for which Eaton wrote the screenplay, and numerous photographs relevant to Eaton and her family. The aim of the Archive is to provide a full survey of Eaton’s work--its generic and stylistic range, its aesthetic experiment, as well as its often problematic politics.

The Winnifred Eaton Archive is organized into exhibits that roughly correspond to periods in Eaton’s career. These periods overlap chronologically somewhat: “Early Experiments” features texts written in the 1890s and early 1900s during Eaton’s writing apprenticeship in Montreal and Jamaica, and/or before she had taken up her identity as “Onoto Watanna”; “Playing Japanese” collects all texts written on Japanese subjects and themes from 1896 until 1922; “New York Years” collects texts marking a period of reinvention, from 1901-1916 after the novelty of Eaton’s Japanese romances had faded; “Alberta” collects texts written about Western ranch country, during her years living off and on in Alberta, roughly from her marriage to Frank Reeve in 1917 until her death in 1954; and finally, “In Hollywood” collects her screenplays, treatments, extant films, as well as fiction about the movie business written from 1916-1935.

The following principles and practices are adapted from The Map of Early Modern London’s “Mission Statement” written by Janelle Jenstad and the MoEML Team.

Our Audience and Contributors

Our Principles

Mary Chapman is the Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive, a Professor of English, and Academic Director of the Public Humanities Hub at University of British Columbia. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism (Oxford UP) and of numerous articles about American literature and women writers. She has also edited Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queen’s UP) and published essays on the Eaton sisters in American Quarterly, MELUS, Legacy, Canadian Literature, and American Periodicals. Her current research project is a microhistory of the Eaton family. For more information, see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/mchapman/.

Jean Lee Cole is Senior Consultant on The Winnifred Eaton Archive, author of The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity (2002), co-editor of A Japanese Nightingale and Madame Butterfly: Two Orientalist Texts (2002, with Maureen Honey), and editor of the original Winnifred Eaton Digital Archive (2004). She is Professor of English at Loyola University Maryland.

Joey Takeda is the Technical Director of The Winnifred Eaton Archive and a Developer at Simon Fraser University’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL). He is a graduate of the M.A. program in English at the University of British Columbia where he specialized in Indigenous and diasporic literature, science and technology studies, and the digital humanities.

Sydney Lines is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of British Columbia and Project Manager of The Winnifred Eaton Archive. She is writing a dissertation on Winnifred Eaton and Laura Goodman Salverson.