15. Sui Sin Far — Mrs. Spring Fragrance with Victoria Namkung
KIM: Hello, and welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, a podcast dedicated to dusting off great books from some of history’s forgotten female writers. I’m Kim Askew...
AMY: And I’m Amy Helmes…
KIM: … we’re best friends and co-authors of the “Twisted Lit” series of young adult novels, and we’re on a mission to unearth some of the most entertaining authors you’ve never heard of.
AMY: This week we’re going back a century to yet another incredible book we can’t believe we hadn’t heard about before, this one by the author Sui Sin Far.
KIM: And it’s really interesting the way her name kept popping up on our radar in recent months. At least two people mentioned her to us, our guest last month, Anne Boyd Rioux, and today’s guest.
AMY: And we’re so glad they did. Clearly great minds think alike — and have the same taste in books! So let’s raid the stacks and get started!
[Intro music]
KIM: Okay, so full disclosure, I’m proud to say that today’s guest is a friend of mine. We’ve worked together for years. Her name is Victoria Namkung, and she’s a journalist and author who’s been featured in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, VICE, The Washington Post, USA Today, and InStyle, among other publications.
She's also the author of two wonderful novels: The Things We Tell Ourselves and These Violent Delights, and she has a degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. Her master’s thesis on import car racing and Asian American masculinity was published in the anthology Asian American Youth.
Welcome, Victoria, and thank you for bringing this brilliant, but relatively unknown, author to our attention!
VICTORIA: My pleasure! Thank you, guys, so much for having me.
AMY: So listeners, first off, when we refer to Sui Sin Far, we want you to know that that’s actually her pen name. Her real name was Edith Maude Eaton, and so you’re going to be hearing us using those two names interchangeably throughout the course of the episode. So for a little background: Eaton was a journalist and writer of Chinese and British descent. She was born in England, but lived the majority of her life in both Canada and the United States. Her father was an English merchant and her mother was a Chinese woman he’d met on a business trip to Shanghai. And honestly, her mother was a pretty amazing woman. She had formerly been enslaved and toured the world as a tightrope dancer as well as the human target of a knife-throwing act (which, I don’t know if that was voluntarily, or probably not, but wow!) She was finally rescued by missionaries from her abusive owner in London in 1855. But that’s another whole story.
KIM: Wow, that is a “truth is stranger than fiction” story right there, and also, it sounds harrowing. So Eaton’s family moved to Montreal in 1872, and her father eventually began a business smuggling Chinese into the U.S. from Montreal. The family struggled financially, but their home environment was actually intellectually stimulating. Eaton was the eldest of fourteen children, and she left school in order to help support them. She did this by writing articles about the Chinese experience for Montreal’s English-language newspapers.
Amy: And then by age 18, she was working as a type-setter for The Montreal Star. She additionally worked as a stenographer and legal secretary, and her experience with all of this plays into the story collection we’re going to be discussing.
KIM: Right, and later, Eaton lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, before she moved to Boston. She “passed” for white (and this is actually a historical term used for a person of color who assimilated into the white majority to escape legal and social discrimination), but in 1896 she began writing articles about what it was like to live as a Chinese woman in a white America. Her collection of short stories, written mostly in the late 1800s, was published in June of 1912, as the novel Mrs. Spring Fragrance.
AMY: Let’s toss it over to Victoria now. When did you first discover Sui Sin Far and this collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and what do you remember about reading her for the first time, Victoria?
VICTORIA: So I discovered her in an Asian American literature class at UC Santa Barbara where I was an undergrad in the late Nineties. We read her first-person essay, Leaves From the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian. I, (being Eurasian myself, or biracial,) I could definitely relate to this experience of being exotified and dehumanized by white and Asian people, and I just remember, because I was a young journalist at the time who really wanted to write fiction, I just thought she was a badass. I didn’t even really know Chinese women in America wrote books at that time. So I just remember being really blown away, and then I read Mrs. Spring Fragrance shortly after that. And some of those stories have stuck with me, even though it’s been more than 20 years since I read it.
Kim: The story collection is actually the earliest known publication by a Chinese woman in the United States, and it’s a window into the lives of Chinese immigrants living in Seattle and San Francisco in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Eaton’s stories really humanized Chinese immigrants for her readers at a time when anti-Chinese sentiment was really rampant in America.
AMY: I want to read a short passage from the book that really illustrates that. This is from the first story in the collection, which is all about Mrs. Spring Fragrance, the title character. She is a Chinese immigrant living in Seattle who happens to be visiting San Francisco at one point in the story. A white American lady friend of hers asks Mrs. Spring Fragrance to accompany her to a lecture, the title of which is “America, the Protector of China!” So you can already imagine what this is going to be like. So Mrs. Spring fragrance later writes home to her husband to recount the whole experience, and she does so with an amazing tongue-in-cheek cynicism. I’m going to read that.
“It was most exhilarating,” [she writes] “and the effect of so much expression of benevolence leads me to beg of you to forget that the barber charges you one dollar for a shave while he humbly submits to the American man a bill of fifteen cents. And murmur no more because your honored elder brother, on a visit to this country, is detained under the roof-tree of this great Government instead of under your own humble roof. Console him with the reflection that he is protected under the wing of the Eagle, the Emblem of Liberty. What is the loss of ten hundred years or ten thousand times ten dollars compared with the happiness of knowing oneself so securely sheltered?”
Can we all just give her a slow-clap right now for the sarcasm? I mean, love it, but then at the same time, it kind of is upsetting.
KIM: Yeah, it’s entertaining, but it also shows a little of what the Chinese newcomers were up against, both in terms of discrimination and in terms of Americans having this patronizing attitude toward them. So Victoria, can you add anything to this in terms of historical and social context?
VICTORIA: Yeah, so Chinese immigration in this country has had a very long and fraught history. It started when predominantly male immigrants from China came to the U.S. in the 1850s to try their luck during California’s Gold Rush, so they worked in mining. And then by the 1860s, around 15,000 Chinese workers were hired to help build the Transcontinental Railroad and they also worked in agriculture and fisheries and as domestic servants and laundrymen. So by the 1870s, there was a widespread depression in the U.S. so this already-brewing hostility toward the Chinese really reached a fever pitch and you started seeing them vilified as moral heathens who were a threat to white America. This went on in speeches and cartoons and even in congressional hearings, which may sound a little familiar today. And they were also rapidly expected to assimilate, and a lot of Christians wanted to convert them as soon as possible. So then, various taxes and racist immigration laws came next to restrict their immigration. The most famous law is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which halted all Chinese immigration for 10 years and prohibited the Chinese who were here from becoming U.S. citizens. This also prevented the reunion of families who were left back in China, you know, wives and children, and anti-miscegenation laws in many western states kept them from marrying white women as well. So the earliest Chinese immigrants certainly faced plenty of discrimination.
AMY: The context you just gave already adds so much for me in terms of what I got out of this book. While I was reading the stories, I kept thinking to myself, “I really want to go back now and start reading some nonfiction about this time period,” because there’s just so much that I was unaware of, like you mentioned, the detentions. The stories give such “slice of life” tales into what these people were going through, and so yeah, I would love to dig a little bit further with some nonfiction, and maybe you have some suggestions for that which we can talk about later. But as delightfully charming as these tales are they are also really ironic in a lot of cases, but also very dark and disturbing. A lot of these stories struck me, though, as surprisingly modern and feminist in that time period. I was surprised by that.
VICTORIA: Yeah, I think a lot of her stories are an indictment of the unrelenting patriarchy, both in the U.S. and in China. So I think she’s absolutely a feminist pioneer in that regard, just to accurately portray the Chinese community and the historical realities, including some of the atrocities committed by our government. No one had done this, to my knowledge. So yes, while some are “slice of life” stories as you mentioned, others kind of feel more like a slap in the face. I’m thinking mainly of “In the Land of the Free,” which is about a Chinese merchant who’s waiting at the San Francisco waterfront to welcome his wife and his two-year-old son, who are coming from China. Upon disembarkment, they take the child away due to a lack of paperwork, and this expensive, 10-month struggle ensues. In the meantime, the boy is sent to a missionary school and renamed, and the eventual family reunion is absolutely crushing.
AMY: Yeah, as I said, a lot of these stories are charming and delightful, but this one was probably the story that I have been thinking about long after closing the book. It was just a gut-punch for me, and it really reminded me of the awful (and pretty similar) plight facing families right now coming across our Southern border.
VICTORIA: Yeah. The other story, in “Wisdom of the New,” you really see the culture shock faced by the Chinese women, in particular, who came to the U.S. to join their husbands. So in this story, the wife character doesn’t speak any English. She has no real life outside the home, and she’s so scared for her child to assimilate to western ways, because that just challenges everything she knows and her whole identity. So the story also highlights the differences in how Chinese and white American women were subjugated at the time.
KIM: So I wanted to talk about the story “Its Wavering Image.” In this one, a journalist woos a half-white, half-Chinese girl. Her name is Pan. And he’s doing it in order to get her to reveal the cultural “secrets” about her Chinese neighbors for a newspaper article he’s writing. I thought that was really interesting, because Eaton was also a journalist and one who could “pass” as white. She wrote articles about the Chinese experience in the U.S. Do you know if she felt any ambivalence herself about sharing the Chinese culture with non-Chinese readers?
VICTORIA: Well, I think her approach was very intentional. Like you said, she could have passed as white and just lived her life in a more privileged way but she purposefully made her home within this Chinese American community and had a very deep interest in the lives of everyday Chinese immigrants. So I think by portraying multidimensional and realistic characters, both in the journalism and her fiction, it really was intended for a non-Chinese audience. I don’t think the Chinese immigrants at the time would have been reading books or articles like these. So I don’t think she felt an ambivalence, per se, but probably just more of a duty to accurately represent as a counterpoint to all this widespread demonization that was going on at the time.
AMY: As a writer, was it risky for her to go ahead and claim this Chinese side of herself publicly when she didn’t have to, or was there something going on in that time period where there was a fascination with Chinese culture, that it was maybe helping her as a writer? Do you happen to know?
VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I know we’re going to talk later about her sister who chose a Japanese-sounding pen name, so she sort of passed as Japanese, which is a whole different conversation, but I think for Eaton, when the Chinese first came, there was this sort of exotification, and a lot of western white people were very fascinated with the culture and thinking, “Oh, we’ll educate them. We’ll assimilate them. Great!” But as soon as the economy started going bad, Chinese just basically became demons to white America, so yes, for her to publicly claim a Chinese identity or even choose this pen name that made her sound far more Asian than maybe her looks would show someone, I think that was a revolutionary idea and certainly more dangerous than just living as a white woman, who could have reported on these communities.
AMY: Right, and we can see the conflict that a lot of these characters face as immigrants. They are so desperately trying to hang on to their Chinese culture while also adapting to the “American” way of life and, at times, being pushed into it by sort of well-meaning (I guess?) white folk. And it’s maddening for these immigrants, at times. So knowing Sui Sin Far’s own lineage, she had obviously a singular insight into this sort of crisis, straddling both cultures. And Victoria, I know you come from two seemingly disparate backgrounds yourself, which I’d love to hear a little bit more about. I’m also wondering if you can relate to Eaton on that level?
VICTORIA: Absolutely. My dad’s Korean, but he attended British and American schools in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. And then my mom is Jewish but was raised in super Catholic Dublin, Ireland. So when you’re multi-racial or multicultural like I am, I think sometimes you just have a larger world view of things. When I was young, when it was far less common to be mixed like this, people would always say to me, “Oh, you have the best of both worlds! You’re ‘East’ meets ‘West!’” They meant that as a compliment, but I think a lot of times being mixed or having a biracial identity means that you experience a lot of racism from both sides and you experience this feeling of a sort of a pressure to choose. So I think with Eaton and myself, we’ve chosen to go with this identity that I guess is more subjugated, which is a strange thing. Like, I have family members who are half-Korean, half-white, but they can pass as white and they sort of live and move through the world as a white person. But I look more Asian, so I kind of felt like that decision was made for me, because that’s how society treats me. So whether or not I feel Korean, it’s not really up to me. So yeah, I think with Eaton, our unique backgrounds give us this different insight into the world and also maybe more empathy for marginalized people because we can feel that experience on both sides.
KIM: Thank you for sharing that, Victoria. We’ve mentioned that Eaton’s writing has a lot of depth and it has all these ironic plot devices, and there’s a lot going on there, but I want to switch gears a little bit and just talk about how exquisite the prose is; how much we loved reading this book, sentence-by-sentence. And I was hoping maybe Victoria you could read one of your favorite passages from this collection.
VICTORIA: Sure! I’m going to read from the opening lines of a story called “The Three Souls of Ah So Nan” which is a story about marriage and grief:
The sun was conquering the morning fog, dappling with gold the gray waters of San Francisco’s bay, and throwing an emerald radiance over the islands around.
Close to the long line of wharves lay motionless brigs and schooners, while farther off in the harbor were ships of many nations riding at anchor.
A fishing fleet was steering in from the open sea, scudding before the wind like a flock of seabirds. All night long had the fishers toiled in the deep. Now they were returning with the results of their labor.
A young Chinese girl, watching the fleet from the beach of Fisherman’s Cove, shivered in the morning air. Over her blue cotton blouse she wore no wrap; on her head, no covering. All her interest was centered in one lone boat which lagged behind the rest, being heavier freighted. The fisherman was of her own race. When his boat was beached he sprang to her side.
AMY: As you can tell from that, the description of the environment that we’re talking about — the cities, the locales — she does such a great job at just placing you right smack in the middle of it, and if you’ve visited any of these cities that she writes about (Seattle, San Francisco, that sort of Pacific Northwest region) she nails it, obviously, because she lived there as well. But Kim, so did you, actually, and I remember when visiting you when you lived in San Francisco, we basically had to walk through Chinatown every day when we were out in the city to get to your apartment. Did that sort of take you back, getting to read about that?
KIM: Yeah, definitely. So even though the “main” thoroughfare when you go to Chinatown in San Francisco is a very touristy experience — I’m sure a lot of people have been to cities and had that “Chinatown” experience — there are streets on either side of the main thoroughfare that really are where, it seemed, Chinese residents actually lived. So, to an outsider anyway, that’s what I saw. I loved walking on those streets, going to the little stores, but what I think is interesting is I was getting an outsider view of Chinatown, and I actually feel like I learned more from these stories about what the Chinese experience has been in the past than I did being so close to that community. Which I think is a shame, and it’s partly on me for not actually looking into that more. And then also, I wish that I had read this (or something like this) earlier so I could have had this window into some of the experiences of people who were living in that neighborhood.
AMY: And yeah, Kim, I understand that sort of idea of being an outsider, which Sui Sin Far shows us in the stories with a lot of these white women characters who are sort of inserting themselves (helpfully and unhelpfully in a lot of ways) which sort of takes us back to the idea of these women characters in the book if you want to touch on that a little more, Kim.
KIM: So yeah, a running theme throughout the stories is the struggle of the independent woman, both Chinese, American, and “mixed” — and they show all the things that they’re up against. They have the weight of cultural and societal norms, but also the patriarchy that they’re working against as well.
AMY: Yeah, it’s like a double whammy, for sure.
VICTORIA: That’s so true. A lot of the stories also highlight women supporting women, which is, I think, how most of us survive living in a patriarchy for our entire lives. In these stories you see instances of white women standing up for or advocating for Chinese women, and you see women backing off from a rivalry or coming to the aid of another woman, so I’m sure that was very intentional on Eaton’s part.
KIM: She also shows a lot of sympathy for Chinese men as well, and the difficulty that they had in culturally assimilating with everything that was stacked against them. She doesn’t seem, though, to have a lot of sympathy for the white male… I’m thinking of the stenographer’s first husband and also the journalist from “Its Wavering Image.” There’s also the depiction of the American smuggler, which ties in to Eaton’s father and the fact that he earned money for a while sneaking Chinese people into America from Canada.
VICTORIA: Yeah, I think since white men have historically been the oppressors or the colonizers, I’m not surprised to see the way she rendered them here. But Eaton does show a ton of sympathy for Chinese men, but at the same time, she doesn’t hesitate to call out China’s policies at the time of, let’s say, educating boys only or how Chinese women had to take their meals after their husbands or at a separate table, or the men who took secondary wives back home. I think it’s really worth noting that Eaton herself never married. Some scholars have read the story “The Chinese Lily” (which is about a disable homebound woman and her sudden friendship with a neighbor) with queer undertones, and I don’t know if Eaton was a lesbian, but she certainly was more concerned with promoting and defending issues of gender and race versus the white men who already dominated society at the time.
AMY: Oh, that’s really interesting about that story you mentioned. I hadn’t read it in that context, but now looking back, I’m like, “Hmmm, yeah.” I can see that a little. And also, I think through a lot of these stories, you can tell that Eaton clearly was a romantic despite the fact that she never married. I mean, these are predominantly tales about marriage and falling in love, and the stories about the young couples struck me as really Shakespearean in a lot of respects. There was a lot of this “star-crossed lover” theme running throughout the stories; that “Romeo-and-Juliet” vibe thanks to this tradition of arranged marriages that the younger people were starting to rebel against.
KIM: Right, and a couple of stories featured women disguising themselves as boys for various reasons… also Shakespearean.
VICTORIA: Well, you guys are the experts on what’s Shakespearean, so I fully agree.
KIM: Everything’s Shakespearean!
AMY: We will find a way to work Shakespeare into everything when we have an opportunity.
VICTORIA: Totally understandable.
AMY: We should also point out, though, that the second half of this story collection are “Tales of Chinese Children.” It takes a really kind of abrupt switcheroo halfway through. These stories are all really quick reads. They’re morality tales. They’re fun, but they’re also, in many ways, I think as dark as the Brothers Grimm. I’m not sure how I felt about them as part of the full collection. I really liked the first half of this story collection a lot more. Victoria, how were her stories received by the public at the time? And do you think she had any sort of agenda in terms of shaping public opinion with her writing, even with these children’s stories?
VICTORIA: Yeah, so she was able to earn a living from her writing and was very widely read in national publications even until her death in 1914, so I would say she was quite successful. And one of my theories is sometimes stories like this are more palatable coming from someone who has maybe a mixed background as opposed to being a Chinese woman with a thick accent or something like that. Of course back then, people would just be reading her, not seeing her in interviews or anything, but Mrs. Spring Fragrance, in particular, was very well-received by critics at the time, and I think it helped shape the reading public’s opinions of the Chinese immigrants because this is just such a different representation compared to what was out there by the U.S. government and politicians and people like that. So I think she did such a great job at just highlighting that Chinese immigrants have the same joys and pains as European Americans.
AMY: I don’t know if anybody else would have been able to successfully accomplish what she was trying to do. I think you almost had to have a writer who understood both sides. Don’t you think?
VICTORIA: I think that’s such a great point, and sometimes I’m asked if just being mixed is a hindrance when I’m working as a journalist, or if it’s impeded my life in some way, and I always say it’s the complete opposite. It just gives you so much more freedom to move between different communities, so I can feel very comfortable with white people, with Asian people, with other groups, and that’s why I love living in Los Angeles, because it’s just so incredibly diverse.
AMY: Do we know if there’s a biography written about her? There must be.
VICTORIA: There is, I don’t have the name handy, but we can maybe talk about it at the end, but yes, there is a biography on her and there’s also one on her sister that I found out. I would just love to see a book on the sisters, even if it was fictionalized because it sounds like there is a lot more to this story.
AMY: And I just think it would be fascinating because she does claim, you know, she was raised basically British, but she knows so much about Chinese culture and her mom must have been a huge influence in terms of all that. I would love to know more about how each parent influenced her, and of course, I want to know more about the mom’s life story because it sounds fascinating.
VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean the mom clearly needs her own book as well, based on what Kim explained about her background. I think, you know, here’s my theory just because I’ve been around so many half-Asian people my whole life: I think most cultures pass down from the mother to children, especially in this era when women tended to work in the house and things like that. So my theory is that when you have a mixed person, even if they look more white, if their mother is the Asian one they tend to be more connected to their Asian culture. In my case, my mother is the Jewish one, so even though I don’t feel super Jewish, I certainly have a lot of her culture and from her growing up in Ireland and living in England, that all got passed down to my sister and I. So even though Eaton didn’t look as Asian as someone who we would all recognize as an Asian person, she may have felt 100 percent Asian in her identity and culture for all we know.
AMY: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Speaking of her sister, let’s get back to that. Victoria, have you by any chance read anything by the sister?
VICTORIA: No, I haven’t read any of her work, but I’m so eager to after learning a little more about her. Winifred chose the Japanese sounding pen name Onoto Watanna, which is a made-up Japanese name. And I think she did this to protect herself from the scorn of the Chinese at the time. So by being “Japanese,” maybe she would be more successful and palatable, and she was capitalizing on her unusual looks. I saw some pictures where she’s posing in kimono, which today might be called cultural appropriation. So she essentially became Japanese and then wrote these lighthearted and risque romance novels and short stories. Her novel A Japanese Nightingale sold thousands of copies and made her famous. It was even adapted to Broadway and to film. And she wrote other bestselling novels and was part of this New York literati scene, and then she also worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter, so both sisters found pretty real success.
AMY: I wonder how authentic she was able to write, though. We should go back and look at some of those books, A Japanese Nightingale and see, like, did she write in a lot of details. Could you tell that she was faking it as opposed to her sister, who added so many details that you were like, “this is a Chinese lady, for sure.”
VICTORIA: Well, I’m sure you both noticed as you’re reading, there’s some language that Eaton uses that’s a little outdated today, like the word oriental. Today we say Asian or Asian American. So I have a feeling if we go back and read Otana’s there’s going to be a lot of exotification of Japanese culture and maybe playing into some of the stereotypes. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I’m just guessing that she knew what the American people wanted to read, and at the time, that was sort of what would sell would be to trade on the “mysterious, submissive geisha” or something like that. So I’m dying to read it. Maybe that can be a future episode.
AMY: Yeah, absolutely! And we’ll have you back on for it.
KIM: I loved Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and I only wish (and it’s the same for all of the books that we’re talking about on the podcast) I just wish that I’d read it sooner. And I also think that although it’s over a hundred years old, it is so relatable to now. We’ve touched on that a little bit, but do you have anything to add about that, Victoria?
VICTORIA: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s disturbingly relatable, you know, considering it’s over a hundred years old, it shouldn’t be as relatable as it is. You know, non-white immigrants and refugees are still vilified right at this moment. The U.S. still has racist immigration laws like the Muslim ban and the Trump administration drastically cut the number of refugees that we accept. And I think Muslims and other groups that racist people mistake for Muslims have just had to deal with such an insane amount of hate crimes and scapegoating since 9/11. I feel like 9/11 was a major shift in racism in this country. And the border crisis and the child separation policy that we’re all horrified by, that experts call torture, is definitely one of the ugliest stains on the country and is so relatable in this book itself. And then the last thing that I would just add is that the Coronavirus pandemic, Asians are now vilified again like they were in Eaton’s day and at other points in history like during World War II. So now you see these racist and xenophobic incidents against Asian Americans and the Human Rights Council at the U.N. called it an alarming level, so I think it’s very clear that Mrs. Spring Fragrance is still resonating today for really upsetting reasons.
AMY: Yeah, the more things change… you know? Well, thank you, Victoria, for sharing your appreciation of Sui Sin Far with us. I don’t know if I would have come to her on my own because I’ve never heard of her, and that’s kind of why we’re doing this podcast — to find out and learn. It’s been so fun to have you on to discuss her! But are there any other Asian-American women writers, especially writers we might not be very familiar with, that you’d also recommend we check out?
VICTORIA: Yes, there are so many! Monica Sone’s Nisei’s Daughter is a memoir of Japanese-American internment, and that book had the most profound impact on my life. I was actually going to become a criminologist prior to reading this book and I just couldn’t believe the way America treated Japanese Americans. I didn’t know anything about it from high school. I was just so stunned, and so that really changed the trajectory of my life. And then some other writers I read at the time are Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who’s from Hawaii. Diana Chang, Jessica Hagedorn, who’s a brilliant Filipina playwright and author. And then Bharati Mukherjee… those are all authors I suggest you check out. And then earlier we talked about reading more nonfiction about the era. So the definitive book that I always recommend to people is by Helen Zia and it’s called Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. That will just give you a comprehensive overview of the Asian American experience, which started with the Chinese immigrants.
AMY: Perfect. Thank you!
VICTORIA: I know we were talking earlier about a biography on Eaton, so there is a book called Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eton. I believe there’s a very thorough introduction with more biographical data, in case anyone’s interested.
AMY: And we will include that whole list that Victoria gave us in our show notes, so no worries to listeners trying to catch all that.
VICTORIA: Well, I used to teach History of Immigration at UCLA so this is my, like, jam. I never get to talk about this stuff anymore. So I could have gone on for hours.
KIM: This is like our dream, though, to just spending all this time talking about books.
VICTORIA: Oh, good!
AMY: So we highly encourage you to put Mrs. Spring Fragrance by Sui Sin Far on your 2021 reading list. And be sure to check out our mini episode next week because we’ll be talking about New Year’s resolutions and how we, as a writing team, go from an idea to a reality.
KIM: And we’ll also be revealing our next author and book title.
AMY: That’s all for today’s podcast. For a full transcript of this episode, check out our show notes, and don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode.
KIM: Do you have ideas for other long-forgotten women authors you’d love to see us revisit on our show? Let us know!
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AMY: Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.