Author Description

Eaton (1875-1954) was a Canadian author of Chinese-British ancestry who published under the Japanese-sounding pseudonym Onoto Watanna. Her English merchant father met her Chinese mother, the adopted daughter of English missionaries, on a business trip to Shanghai. In the 1870s the family settled in Montreal where Winnifred was born, and despite the financial difficulties of supporting 14 children, they were raised in an intellectually stimulating environment which enabled Winnifred's older sister Edith Maude to become a journalist and author of stories about impoverished Chinese immigrants written under the pen-name Sui Sin Far. Winnifred's first story was published in a Montreal paper when she was 14 and she soon had articles accepted by several popular magazines in the US. In her late teens she moved to Chicago, working as a typist whilst continuing to write, and soon had her work published in the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals. She then turned to novel writing, capitalizing on her mixed ancestry to pass herself off as a Japanese American, and relocated to New York. She produced a number of bestsellers and later wrote screenplays for the burgeoning film industry. This novel was first published in 1912 and includes a frontispiece and a facsimile of the original cover.