Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton ed. by Mary Chapman

Mary Chapman's Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton offers readers the most comprehensive glimpse so far of Sui Sin Far, the pen name of the writer best known for her Chinatown stories. Chapman's resourceful, sustained digging into periodicals has uncovered 150 previously unknown (often unsigned or pseudonymous) texts by Eaton, bringing her full oeuvre to over 260 works. Seventy-one texts are included in this collection; half are new discoveries. Through this collection and full bibliography, as well as an introduction that places Eaton's work in its broader scholarly context, Chapman has not only expanded our understanding of Eaton's writing, but also enabled future work by making hard-to-find texts available in an edited volume. Chapman's book is a substantial contribution to both Eaton studies and periodicals research.

Chapman builds on the recovery work of Martha Cutter, Dominika Ferens, Carol Kim Helfer, June Howard, and Annette White-Parks, scholars whose discoveries were driven by resourcefulness, the emergence of new tools for research, and a sustained interest in Eaton as a writer. While not all the texts reprinted in this volume are new discoveries—including many listed in the bibliography of Dominika Ferens's Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances (2002) as well as "Away Down in Jamaica" (discovered by Martha Cutter) and "A Visit to Chinatown" (discovered by Carol Kim Helfer)—there is value in including these texts, as they are now more easily available to researchers. By including selections from Eaton's journalism in Gall's Daily News Letter (Jamaica) under the pseudonym Fire Fly, for example, Chapman has given broader access to texts in periodicals that are currently available only on microfilm. Beyond making such texts more accessible to researchers, teachers, and students, Chapman's book places already known but infrequently studied texts in conversation with new discoveries, highlighting the range of concerns in Eaton's work. Likewise, Chapman's inclusion of work from Montreal is key to highlighting the necessity of staying attentive to the Canadian contexts of Eaton's writing as well as her transnational concerns, rather than subsuming her into US ethnic contexts (xxx).

The implications for new work on Eaton that this collection and the accompanying scholarly apparatus offer—including a primer on periodicals research on authors who published under multiple names that researchers at all levels will find useful—are considerable. As Chapman points out, scholarship on Eaton has largely focused on her Chinatown stories, a move that at times oversimplifies her biography and her work by "interpreting her oeuvre solely along racial or national lines," despite Eaton's own insistence on seeing "individuals as individuals rather than for their near nationality or any other collective identity" (xvi). While attention to Eaton's work within the context of US or Canadian ethnic literary traditions has been important, her writing under different pen names necessarily opens up other ways to think about her work and her place in literary history. Chapman argues that critics should recognize that Eaton "occupied multiple subject positions in terms of class, gender, and nationality" (xviii). By republishing these works, identifying new ones, and making clear the necessity of reconsidering Eaton's work beyond her concern with Asian American issues and questions, Chapman illustrates how "Eaton's expanded oeuvre shows incredible diversity in terms of genre, venue of publication, subject matter, style, and assumed audience" (xxi).

Although about half of the selections included in this collection concern Asian and Asian American issues, we also gain a stronger sense of Eaton as a journalist and her writing in the sentimental mode. The first section, "Early Montreal Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Sketches (1888–1891)," underscores the heavily sentimental strain evident in Eaton's later Chinatown fiction. Viewed as a whole, it becomes clear that romances that meet unreasonable and implacable...