148. Winnifred Eaton — Cattle with Mary Chapman

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY HELMES: Back in our early days of this podcast, we did an episode on Sui Sin Far, a.k.a. Edith Maude Eaton, with guest Victoria Namkung. That was episode No. 15, if you want to go back and have a listen when you're finished with this episode.

KIM: In that episode we mentioned that Edith had a sister, Winnifred, who was also a writer, and we talked about wanting to eventually circle back to do an episode on her. She sometimes wrote under the Japanese sounding pseudonym, Onoto Watanna.

AMY: Well, the day for circling back is today, and the timing couldn't be better because Winnifred Eaton's novel Cattle is about to turn 100, and a new edition of the novel is being released next week by Invisible Publishing, which describes this book as " a curious Canadian mixture of Hardy and Steinbeck."

KIM: I was also reminded of Edna Ferber's So Big, which was published just one year after Cattle came out.

AMY: And if you're a fan of the hit TV series “Yellowstone” and its prequel “1923,” you are going to absolutely love this novel. It gives off a lot of classic Western vibes. It's about a group of cattle ranchers and is set amidst the sweeping landscape of Alberta. 

KIM: Yet there's an unmistakable darkness that pervades the book, and a pandemic also factors into this novel, which modern readers will undoubtedly be able to identify with. We are so thrilled to have the director of the Winnifred Eaton Archive joining us today to discuss the novel and its fascinating author. So without further ado, let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[intro music plays]

KIM: Our guest today, Mary Chapman, is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia, where she was the founding academic director of the Public Humanities Hub.

AMY: She's also the author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture, and US Modernism, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. And she edited the book Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton. In addition to overseeing the Winnifred Eaton Archive, she's written extensively on the Eaton sisters for a variety of scholarly publications. Later this month, she'll be spearheading a conference in Calgary called “Onoto Watana's Cattle at 100,” at which leading scholars on Winnifred Eaton will convene.

KIM: And if anybody listening lives nearby, there will be several public events happening in connection with the conference, including a “Winnifred Lived Here” walking tour of Calgary. Oh my gosh, I wish I could go and we'll share our details for it in our show notes.Mary Chapman, I'm sure you must be very busy gearing up for this event, so thank you for taking the time to talk with us today, and we just wanna welcome you to the show.

MARY: Thank you so much for having me.

AMY: I think few people are more perfectly suited to tell us about Winnifred Eaton than you, Mary. So let's start with her upbringing. There were 14 children and of those 14, 12 children survived. So, huge family. The eldest sister was Edith, who was our previous lost lady from a few years back. Winnifred was the eighth child to come along in 1875. The family lived in Canada. Their father was a painter and a British merchant, and their mother came to England from China as a young girl. This is interesting, she was a performer in an acrobatic troupe. Mary, what else can you tell us to shed light on Winnifred's childhood and how it might have shaped who she wound up becoming?

MARY: All I can say is they were a wild family. The mom had been an enslaved child acrobat. She performed in the gold rush in San Francisco in 1852, and she toured the world and then sort of escaped the man who was considered abusive and trained to be a missionary and went to China.So she met Edward Eaton there, and as you said, he was a merchant. They married and settled in Montreal and had this huge family. So I imagine the space where Winnifred grew up as a crowded, loud, strong personality space with all kinds of vulnerability and volatility. I mean, how did the dad support this big crowd? How were they treated as a mixed race family in the 1870s and eighties? I think Winnifred had to speak up to get attention and she had to assert herself and she's certainly a strong personality.

AMY: Didn’t she also kind of have a penchant for fudging the truth? 

MARY: Yeah. Um, she's an opportunist. So if there's a story that will work to advance her in some way, she will. She's just a strong ego with grand ambitions, and so she's going to tell whatever version of the truth can get her where she wants to go.

KIM: Right. And she has the imagination to, to get away with it.

MARY: Yeah. Yeah.

KIM: So I'm curious how the two sisters, Winnifred and Edith, differed in terms of their personalities. So was Winnifred influenced at all by seeing her older sister getting her stories published?

MARY: Yeah, their relationship is so interesting because it's kind of undocumented. They're separated by 10 years. I think Edith, as the eldest daughter, has to be the responsible, maternal, and possibly bossy older sister. Certainly in some of the autobiographical stuff that Winnifred writes, there's an older, disapproving, chaperone- like sister, and that seems like Edith. But at the same time because Winnifred is so precocious, she does stuff first. So she goes to Jamaica as a 21 year old and works as a stenographer journalist, and then leaves Jamaica and Edith follows her. So it's a little bit, you know, uh, contrary to what we would expect. Edith published earlier, but Winnifred published in better journals sooner. Winnifred was so egotistical and such a strong personality that I think Edith probably found her hard to take, but I also think they had very different relations to their ethnic backgrounds, and that probably caused a rift. So, for example, in the papers that Winnifred left behind, there are letters to other sisters, there are photographs with other sisters, but there's nothing with Edith. So is it because they were geographically separated? Is it because they were personally at odds? I don't know.

KIM: Interesting. So while big sister Edith embraced her Chinese heritage and writing, Winnifred actually took an altogether different approach when she was starting out as a novelist. Mary, can you walk us through this?

MARY: Yeah, this is a crazy story. So Edith starts writing stories under a Chinese pseudonym, Sui Sin Far, or we could say [Chinese pronunciation] that would be my best effort at a Mandarin pronunciation, she published a lot of stories that were sympathetic chronicles of Chinatowns in North America, and she lived in many cities with large Chinatowns like Seattle, San Francisco, L.A. Winnifred started publishing Orientalist stuff around the same time, but she published them not only under a kind of faux Japanese pseudonym, but she also wore kimonos, spoke with the halting Japanese accent, sort of did the whole channeling of this persona. Most critics have seen them as, you know, the “good sister,” the “bad sister.” The one who embraces her authentic makeup and the one who doesn't. But I think there's a more complicated story there. So the reason I would say that is A, Edith also publishes about non-Chinese people. She publishes about Japanese. She publishes about Persian. She writes a lot of children's stories featuring children from around the world. She doesn't assume that she is from those ethnicities, but anyway… but Winnifred, also, one of her earliest stories was about Montreal Chinatown. But for some reason she starts pretending to be Japanese at this point. I have a lot of theories about why, and they have to do with: She flees Jamaica. She doesn't go home. She goes to a brother in Cincinnati. She hangs out in Cincinnati for a few months. She starts wearing kimonos, high-waisted body covering gowns. I think she got pregnant in Jamaica. I have no documentation about this, but I think she got pregnant, and I think it was what any 21-year-old, panicked girl from an upright family would do. Just hide it as best she could. And then speaking of lies and what happens to them, that lie got legs. She was encouraged by an editor in Cincinnati to write a story about Japan since she clearly was a Japanese noble woman. So she said, “Okay.” And she did, and it got published. And then one imagined world kind of took flight.

KIM: That's fascinating.

AMY: Yeah, I haven't read any of these Japanese stories or novels, but are they accurate? I mean, how hard would that have been to pretend to be from a culture that you're not. I mean, what was she even drawing on and wouldn't somebody have been like, “Wait a second…?”

MARY: Right. Yeah, that's a great question. So two answers. One is that her father's brother moved to Japan and he lived there for 27 years, and he married a Japanese woman and he had at least one child. I think the families were close. But there was a Japanese connection for the Eaton family, so it's not completely out of the air that she embraces some of the stories and the history and the clothing and traditions, right? The other thing is, I think she was an excellent researcher. I've found some journals, some magazines about the Far East published by, you know, the Asiatic Society or whatever. She's clearly read these because in some cases the material that she puts in her books is word for word from these articles. So she's doing her research, and many Japanese scholars, even as late as the 1960s, found her descriptions of some of the landscapes and clothing and traditions very accurate. So I think she did her homework and she had a family connection. Did somebody see through this charade and this masquerade? Yes. So by about 1903 or 1904, the story of her ancestry got more, um, more modest over time, and then she really tried to step away from it. So in 1907, 1908, she really is moving away from the content, moving away from the pen name, but she's a brand. And the publishers will not let her relinquish that profitable, bestselling brand. In many ways that's why I'm sympathetic to the arc of her career. I don't condone that ethnic masquerade. I think it was really destructive, and she took the space that might have been available to Japanese authors or Japanese American authors. So I don't think we can condone that. But I think when she recognizes just how offensive and problematic that masquerade was and she moves on. This Alberta phase, what she writes is fantastic and very much based on experience.

AMY: You know, she's got this legacy today of what we would call cultural appropriation. Does that contribute at all to the fact that we don't hear about her as much? And people being hesitant about celebrating her?

MARY: Yes. I think she's easy to be completely fascinated by, but she's hard to love. Her works raise challenges. There are a lot of racial slurs against Chinese people, against Japanese people, against indigenous people, so those texts are hard to teach, possibly more so because you have a racialized writer who doesn't seem to be taking good care with issues like respect, authenticity, appropriation, et cetera. However, I think there have been a number of calls for a fairer kind of attention to her. But then the momentum is lost because we're living in a cancel culture. We're living in more of a contemporary literary culture, and contemporary writers are going to navigate some of the questions with greater skill to meet our expectations. Whereas writers in the past are going to disappoint us. They just aren't going to navigate many of the questions as well. So that's one of the reasons we're having this conference. Can we pay attention to her career in enough detail to fairly assess the value of her output, and not to condone the phases that we find problematic, but to give more attention to the phases that are less problematic, that have frankly not been given enough attention because people have been so quick to keep the conversation solely focused on the Japanese phase.

KIM: Right, right.

AMY: Okay, so her debut novel is Miss Numé of Japan, which was a sensation. She eventually found her way to New York where she was part of the New York literati, wouldn't you say, Mary?

MARY: Absolutely. She knew everyone. You know, she went to Mark Twain's birthday party. She hobnobbed with Jean Webster. Um, Edith Wharton seemed to be on her radar. She hung out with a lot of playwrights and people who at the time were, you know, prominent movers and shakers, but maybe we wouldn't have heard of now. And she was a bestselling novelist, so her works were getting adapted for stage, made into films, uh, translated. She was very well connected with the New York scene, for sure.

KIM: So soon after moving to New York, she meets and marries a journalist. They have four children together, but they divorced after 16 years of marriage. He was an abusive alcoholic and she was the main breadwinner of the house. And then soon after her divorce was final, she remarried. And this is where circumstances start leading her toward the writing of Cattle.

MARY: Yeah. I, I don't know enough about how she met Frank Reeve in the New York area and what possessed them to pull up stakes and move to Alberta. 

AMY: Can I interrupt for a second? Just because this is fresh in my mind. I thought they met in Reno when she went for a quickie divorce. I think that's what I remember happened, and I'll, I'll double check that. But um, yeah, so then the divorce went through and she has already met her new man.

MARY: All right. Well, he was a very, um, you know, manly, confident guy, and he had some farming roots. You know, he had sort of people in the family who had done farming and she loved horses. She rode horses in Central Park as often as she could. So I think somehow, so, leaving town, getting away from her past was a good move. And certainly Alberta at the time was a really weird space. Wealthy people, aristocrats, the Prince of Wales, for example, were buying ranches in Alberta. So there was kind of a glamorous life, even as one would also be having a rural, possibly quiet, possibly anonymous life. So yeah, they moved to Alberta.

AMY: I didn't know the Alberta connection when I was reading Cattle, and I kept wondering about it because it was so clear that she knew what she was talking about in this case. You know, she might have been winging it with the Japanese stuff but this area she knew.

KIM: Absolutely. Absolutely. So let's dive into our discussion of the novel now. Mary, do you want to give the listeners a quick spoiler free rundown of the plot to just start us off?

MARY: Sure. So, the main antagonist is a guy nicknamed Bull Langdon. He's a rancher. He's violent towards everyone and everything, and he has this covetous eye. He wants to brand everything. So branding is almost the primary trope of the novel. Bull wants to put his brand, his ownership, on everything he sees. So of course he has conflicts with neighboring farmers, um, and a servant girl. It all takes place against the backdrop of the Spanish Flu. So there's a sense of a pandemic that's going to separate people, keep people private, keep people away from one another, and yet people all come together to help one another. And that ethos is completely foreign to Bull. So without giving too many details, he gets his just desserts by the end of the novel. You said, no spoilers, so I just…

AMY: Yeah. I think we can talk about Nettie a bit though, um, because she's the heroine.

MARY: Sure. So let's talk about Nettie. Yeah. So the story really is about his rape of his servant girl and what she does in response and who helps her. It's a realistic depiction of somebody being raped, which was not where fiction writers and editors wanted to go in the 1920s. And so I think it was a challenging depiction for some people, but there's also a sense that the rape figures as a kind of allegorical take on all of Bull's behaviors. You know, he is raping the land, raping the community, raping the indigenous people, and this is his settler, colonialist approach to possessing the land.

AMY: Mary, I think I emailed you when I was reading this that I was thinking of the “Access Hollywood” tape a lot because he just thinks of women as cattle. I mean, there's the title right there. He puts them in the same classification. And there's a point where he basically says something to the effect of, Any woman I want, I can have her. 

MARY: I can get, yeah. Yeah, and as you said when you were reading this text, you felt like she understood this world she was writing from experience. I think she's close to the grittiness and the challenge of the Alberta frontier. People live in wide open spaces. They're vulnerable to the environment, to weather, to potential violence, to neighbors. Uh, it's not a heavily policed space. You know, people aren't attending to, you know, basic civic proprieties like they might in a city. So all the vulnerability, she's really aware of it. And the story of the servant girl, she says in something she wrote that she heard that this had happened to someone nearby.So obviously that was a starting point for the novel.

AMY: Would you mind sharing a favorite passage from Cattle? Anything you would wanna pick out? 

MARY: Okay, this is from early in the novel, and it really, conveys Bull's personality and sort of reflects back on what Amy was asking about the former president of the United States. 

You recalled when first the Bull, or to give him his proper name, Bill Langdon, came into the foothills.

His brand blazed out, bold and huge before the trails were staked and the railroads were pushing their noses into the new land. Even at that early period, his covetous eye had marked the Indian cattle. Rolling fat in quotation marks as the term is in the cattle world, and smugly grazing over the rich pasture lands with the ID Indian department brand upon their right ribs, a warning to rustlers from east and west and south and north.

These were the property of the Canadian government. Little cared Bull Langdon for the Canadian government. And he fat contemptuously at the word Bull had come hastily out of Montana. And although he had flouted and set a defiance, the laws of his native land away from it, he chose to regard with supreme contempt, all other portions of the earth that were not included in the Great Union across the line. 

Here's one more thing I want to read:

If the Bull considered men of the same breed as cattle, he had less respect for the female of the human species. With few exceptions, he snarled, spitting with contempt. Women were scrub stock, easy stuff that could be whistled or driven to home pastures a man had, but to reach out and help him himself to what he desired.

AMY: So, yeah, very recognizable villain there. Um, I was shocked the rape happens kind of early in the novel, so that's not a major spoiler for any listeners. I did not expect that Eaton would take that scene as far as she did in the book. It was shocking.

KIM: Yeah, it's like, it felt like she didn't really hold back in it. It's harsh, it's disturbing. It's sort of reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles or something like that, and you're just, when you start reading it, you don't think it's going to go there, and it really does pretty quickly.

MARY: Yeah, I had an undergrad student working on the Winnifred Eaton archive, helping us digitize many of the works, and the number of times she suggested to me that we needed to build in some kind of trigger warnings, because it's harsh. She doesn't hold back, as you say. She doesn't hold back from depictions, and sometimes it's really unexpected what's going to happen.

KIM: So, as we said, the Bull is going around stealing other people's cattle wherever he finds them. And you had alluded to this too, but in the introduction to this new edition, Lily Cho talks about colonialism with regard to this book. Is there anything more you wanna say about that?

MARY: I was shocked when I taught this book for the first time. My students found it so fresh, so immediate, so contemporary, they were shocked. It addresses so many of the issues that we're dealing with right now. It addresses #MeToo. It addresses rape allegations, sexual assault trials, et cetera. And then it's got this added level of dealing with in indigenous people on the land who have no control over what an avaricious determined powerful brute of a man will do. So settler colonialism is everywhere here. I also love that, a Chinese man who's working as a cook on the ranch is the one who administers the justice of the situation at the end to Bull. It seems to me very contemporary too, because 1923 was the year that Chinese immigration halted in Canada. So she's making space for heroism on the part of this lonely Chinese man separated from his family, vulnerable, working for a brute of a man.

AMY: And speaking of how relevant so many issues in the book are today, the backdrop being the Spanish flu epidemic, um, which would've matched up to the time that she was living in Alberta. She would've gone through that. But yeah, you're thinking, “Oh, I remember this from a few years ago.” You know, like the talk around town like, “Oh, that's in the big cities. It's probably not gonna get all the way out here. We don't need to worry about that.” Um, and then of course, people start dropping like dominoes. Why do you think she might have chosen to incorporate the pandemic into her story beyond just the fact that that time period she lived through it?

MARY: Yeah, it's a great question. Settler colonialism really believes that the individual can just come in, take what he needs and does not need to collaborate, negotiate, share at all. But the people surviving the pandemic in this novel survive because they collaborate. So an older woman who's farming on her own, she's an eccentric older woman. What is she doing out there with her own farm? She basically brings the pregnant servant girl into her home and takes care of her, and then she gets sick and the servant girl Nettie takes care of her. Nettie helps the doctor who's driving around a broad rural area take care of people during this pandemic. And so the communal shared caring for others ethos that the pandemic brings out in these marvelous characters is really and antithetical to what brings Bull down, his selfish, individualist approach to his career, I guess.

KIM: you mentioned the character who's farming on her own. Her name's Angela, and she's described by her neighbors as a quote “man-woman.” She's isolated, she's working her own land. And Amy, this also reminded me of So Big, a book we did early on in the podcast. Um, the main character, Selena, also successfully works her farm on her own. In Cattle, Angela actually comes across as the hero of the book, wouldn't you say, Mary?

MARY: I think there are multiple heroes. There are kind of heroic cameos like the Chinese cook. There's the caring heroine of Angela just helping Nettie have that baby, raise that baby, care for that baby. When the baby's born, Nettie is kind of remote from it. She can't quite love after such a traumatic experience. So Angela is full of love. She's an angel figure of a sort. The “man-woman” is such an interesting idea, because my students thought there was definitely a queer potential to the structure of this unusual family, you know, a woman who's wearing pants and farming, a young girl who's been raped, and then maybe this doctor figure who's coming and going, but seems to have a more traditionally feminine affect in his caring. He's kind of very maternal in his attentions to both of the women. And then there's Nettie's love interest, who loves singing and just is almost like a lullaby singer, you know? So the roles that people play in terms of gender are quite free and unbridled, and I think really nurturing where Bull's definition of masculinity is so narrow. He cannot feel, all he can do is strike out.

AMY: The novel as a whole reminded me a lot, I'm probably the only one among us three that watches the “Yellowstone” series on Paramount, but “Yellowstone” and, um, the other series … “1923,” which “1923” there's very much a Bull Langdon character in that show. Um, so yeah, it feels very cinematic.

KIM: I thought Power of the Dog, too, which is a recent one. There's like that simmering darkness in there too. Yeah.

AMY: Yeah. 

MARY: Power of the Dog, you really feel the vulnerability of the women, you know, you're out in the middle of nowhere and you're completely vulnerable. Um, yeah. For me, I mean, you also mentioned Edna Ferber's So Big. So there's Willa Cather's My Antonia. The most memorable image that people tend to have of that novel is this strong immigrant girl at the plow. So women as farmers… it seems a kind of gender disconnect for us now because even if I say the word farmer, one will assume I'm talking about a man. But in this story, and I think it's true in My Antonia, and I'm not sure about So Big because that's a Ferber novel I haven't read. But women as farmers, there's a closer connection than you think because they're close to the land, they're close to lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, they're nurturing something vulnerable so that it can grow. So it's a very maternal trope and not a surprise that it appears in all three of these novels within six or seven years of one another.

AMY: Yeah. And in this book it's the women working, Nettie and Angela working the farm together is what winds up helping them to heal, each in their own right. And. It makes me think of Winnifred Eaton's own work ethic. And she's clearly trying to say that, you know, it's important for women to work.

MARY: Yes, exactly, whether that work is going to Hollywood to run Universal Studio’s Script Department, or being a freelance writer and you know, churning out best selling novels or if it is cooking up enough food to feed all the ranch hands during the harvest. I mean, one of the things that I've loved about directing the Winnifred Eaton archive is that we have,you know, doubled her oeuvre, basically. We've found a ton of stuff, um, maybe not doubled, but we found many works that were never published. We brought to light works that are hidden in the archives. We've found things buried in little local newspapers that people weren't aware that she wrote, and they're full of hard work on the ranch, cooking, preserving, planting, harvesting the risks of a sudden storm wrecking a wheat wheat harvest. So it really comes through to us how much of a commitment she'd made to that life she'd chosen.

AMY: This book didn't sell as well as her Japanese novels, right?

MARY: That's right.

AMY: Why do we count it as significant in comparison to her many other works?

MARY: I think often what sells at the time might not live on and what doesn't sell at the time might become a classic. My favorite anecdote about Walden, you know the book that Henry David Thoreau wrote? He says, “I have a library of 700 volumes, all of which are my own.” And so what that means is that book was remaindered, sweetie. Nobody bought that book. And you know, similarly, some of the novels that we associate with the greatness of Herman Melville were not the ones that sold at the time. So she has a perfect formula in her bestselling novels, and I can see why they were popular. This one I think is going to endure, and the reason why I was so delighted that Invisible Publishing wanted to reissue it is because I know from the classroom that students are going to engage it because it's so immediately fresh and urgent in its concerns.

KIM: So her film career, you know, she was writing screenplays early on in her career. She was involved in motion pictures. What happened? She took on a more prominent role at one point? What happened with that?

 MARY: Yeah, I think her marriage was kind of struggling, you know, she had all these kids and they were on the ranch and finances were tight. She packed the kids up onto the train and went to New York and worked in the screenwriting department at Universal Studios. And then the studio moved her out to Hollywood. So this goes back to Amy's question about the literati. Hollywood was this hungry machine and it needed content. It's sort of like, you know, Netflix today, right? Like they're just looking for stories that they can film. And so, uh, Hollywood mostly turned to New York, to New York writers. “You're a novelist, you're a playwright, you can write dialogue. Give me a story.” So Winnifred recruited lots of people. Many of the screenwriters she worked most closely with aren't household names now, but she was well connected. So she definitely brought, um, writers out to Hollywood. She started there in, I think, 1924, and seemed to be pretty active through to 1930 or so. Then the trail gets a bit cold. Uh, there are a lot of screenplay drafts in her archives in Calgary. They are undated, and it's unclear if other writers wrote them, sent them to her, she was editing them or giving them feedback, or if she wrote them. But there are all these mysteries about the screenplay aspects of her archive because it's such a collaborative process, and the titles of films change from the draft script to the eventual production. So we're not even sure how many of these have been filmed.

KIM: So now that we've read Cattle, what do you suggest we check out next by Winnifred Eaton? 

MARY: I think Me and Marion are both fascinating novels because she's writing them at mid-career. They're based on things she knows. They're not her Japanese masquerade and, and I think she covers a lot of, topics that would resonate with people. So definitely Me, Me could be subtitled #MeToo. It's definitely that kind of book. Marian, I think the subtitle is The Artist's Model, and it's basically about a young woman who has artistic, uh, ambitions of her own, but the best way to get a job is to serve as an artist model and kind of negotiating independent young womanhood in that kind of environment. So I think those are great reads.

AMY: Another great read is the biography of Eaton. It's by her granddaughter, Diana Birchall. I mean, we've just spent almost an hour talking about her and there are so many stories from her life that are pretty crazy that we just didn't even have time to get into in terms of her personal life. I know that Diana Birchall is gonna be participating in the upcoming conference too.

MARY: Yes, Diana has nurtured and mentored a whole generation of scholars. She calls them Winniers. We're all Winniers, because we work on Winnie. she's just been so generous and encouraging. She's kind of the family's literary executor of Winnifred, and so she has graciously agreed to start the conference off with a few words about her amazing grandmother and her amazing connection to her grandmother. I mean, Diana, in addition to writing that biography, has written fascinating Jane Austen fan fiction. Before fan fiction was a thing, Diana was doing it. She's a very creative, talented writer. Anyway, so we're completely honored to have her present at the conference and just hang out with the family. Many descendants of the Eaton family are going to come to this conference. And the whole spirit of the conference is to give scholars an opportunity to presents scholarly work, but also have some complimentary events like screenings of Phantom of the Opera, which Winnifred Eaton wrote the screenplay for, uh, discussions of her Hollywood career, a banquet inspired by the crazy Chinese Japanese cookbook Winnifred wrote with one of her sisters. 

KIM: How fun.

MARY: Apparently, if you actually cook those recipes, they're terrible. But, we're giving a very skilled set of cooks at a Chinese restaurant free reign to do their own impression of Chinese banquet eating. So we'll have that event, and we're also having a genealogical workshop for people who are curious to trace Chinese ancestry or do this kind of tricky biographical research, especially now.

 AMY: I feel like once you start having a conference surrounding you, maybe you're not quite so lost anymore. 

MARY: Yeah, 

AMY: You're getting to be unlost a little, which is good news.

MARY: That's the hope. That she will be found. So with the addition of Cattle and the Winnifred Eaton Archive and the conference, we're hoping that's kind of a, a perfect, uh, trio of celebratory moves to put her back in people's, uh, lights.

AMY: And listeners, in our show notes we're gonna link to the Winnifred Eaton Archive, just because there is so much amazing information on it about everything that she's written, a timeline of her life, and some really cool old family photos. She really did lead quite a life and it's worth going on there to just explore a little bit more.

KIM: And Mary, thank you so much for all the work you've done and continue to do to keep Winnifred Eaton's literary legacy alive. And thank you for joining us on the show today. We really loved having you.

MARY: Thank you so much for having me, you guys. That was an invigorating conversation and I enjoyed and appreciated all your great questions.

AMY: So that's all for today's episode. Don't forget if you enjoyed it, to give us a rating and review. Five stars, please, to show us that you are out there.

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone. Our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.