The first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays a gifted, unsung woman and a world rarely seen in anything other than stereotypes. The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec in the early 1870s; she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings.

In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name she has come to be known by, Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States.

1. Today Sui Sin Far is finally being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinese with an insider's sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, breaking the stereotypes of silence, invisibility, and "bachelor society."