Sui Sin Far

Sui Sin Far (1865–1914) was the pen name of Edith Maude Eaton, the first writer of Chinese descent to publish fiction in North America. Born in England to an English father and a Chinese mother and raised in Montreal, the eldest of fourteen children, she worked as a stenographer and journalist and wrote about the Chinese communities of Montreal, San Francisco, Seattle and Boston at a time of exclusion laws and open prejudice. Her stories and essays appeared in American magazines from the 1890s, and her only book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, was published in 1912. Her sister Winnifred wrote popular novels under a Japanese pseudonym.