Winnifred Eaton was a Chinese Canadian writer at the turn of the century who published fifteen books and constructed a public identity as Onoto Watanna, author of several best-selling romances set in Japan featuring American, English, Japanese, and Eurasian characters. She wrote the first novel authored by an Asian American, Miss Numè of Japan: A Japanese-American Romance (1899), while her sister Edith Eaton, who wrote under the name Sui Sin Far, is credited with being the first Asian American to publish fiction. The Eaton sisters pioneered a creative path for Asian American writers, particularly women, in the twentieth century as they inserted a new voice into Canadian American literature, that of the Chinese, Japanese, or Eurasian subject, and attempted to counter the dominant cultural stereotypes of Asians as the inhuman, orientalized other.

Eaton has been overshadowed by her sister, whose work has been reprinted and whose life was...