William Sharp (writer): Difference between revisions

William Sharp (12 September 1855 – 12 December 1905) was a Scottish writer, of poetry and literary biography in particular, who from 1893 wrote also as Fiona Macleod, a pseudonym kept almost secret during his lifetime.^[1] He was also an editor of the poetry of Ossian, Walter Scott, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Eugene Lee-Hamilton.

Biography

Sharp was born in

He was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Sir Noel Paton, and joined the Rossetti literary group; which included Hall Caine, Philip Bourke Marston and Swinburne. He married his cousin Elizabeth in 1884, and devoted himself to writing full-time from 1891, travelling widely.

Also about this time, he developed an intensely romantic but perhaps asexual attachment to Edith Wingate Rinder, another writer of the consciously Celtic Edinburgh circle surrounding Patrick Geddes and "The Evergreen". It was to Rinder ("EWR") he attributed the inspiration for his writings as Fiona Macleod thereafter, and to whom he dedicated his first Macleod novel ("Pharais") in 1894. Sharp had a complex and ambivalent relationship with W. B. Yeats during the 1890s, as a central tension in the Celtic Revival. Yeats initially found Macleod acceptable and Sharp not, and later fathomed their identity. Sharp found the dual personality an increasing strain.

On occasions when it was necessary for "Fiona Macleod" to write to someone unaware of the dual identity, Sharp would dictate the text to his sister (Mary Beatrice Sharp), whose handwriting would then be passed off as Fiona's manuscript. During his Macleod period, Sharp was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

He died (and is buried) at

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and Study (1882)
• The Human Inheritance, The New Hope, Motherhood and Other Poems (1882)
• Sopistra and Other Poems (1884);
• Earth's Voices (1884) poems
• Sonnets of this century (1886) editor
• Sea-Music: An Anthology of Poems (1887)
• Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1887)
• Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (1888)
• Sport of chance (1888) novel
• Life of Heinrich Heine (1888)
• American Sonnets (1889)
• Life of Robert Browning (1889)
• The Children of Tomorrow (1889)
• Sospiri di Roma (1891) poems
• Life of Joseph Severn (1892)
• A Fellowe and his Wife (1892)
• Flower o' the Vine (1892)
• Pagan Review (1892)
• Vistas (1894);
• Pharais (1894) novel as FM
• The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (1895)
• Mountain Lovers (1895) novel as FM
• The Laughter of Peterkin (1895) as FM
• The Sin-Eater and Other Tales (1895) as FM
• Ecce puella and Other Prose Imaginings (1896)
• Green Fire: A Romance (1896) novel as FM
• The Washer of the Ford (1896) novel as FM
• Fair Women in Painting and Poetry (1896)
• Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry (1896)
• By Sundown Shores (1900) as FM
• The Divine Adventure (1900) as FM
• Iona (1900) as FM
• From the Hills of Dream, Threnodies Songs and Later Poems (1901) as FM
• The Progress of Art in the Nineteenth century (1902)
• Wind and wave: selected tales (1902)
• The House of Usna (1903) play as FM
• Literary Geography (1904)
• The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (1904) as FM and dedicated to Dr John Goodchild
• The Immortal Hour (1908) play as FM
• Selected writings (1912) 5 Vols.
• The Hills of Ruel, and Other Stories (1921) as FM

Popular culture

In Disney's 2017 movie production of Beauty and the Beast, the character of Belle, played by Emma Watson, recites to the Beast character several lines of Sharp's poem, A Crystal Forest, "Each branch, each twig, each blade of grass, / Seems clad miraculously with glass".

References

• "William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir" (1910, 1912) Elizabeth A. Sharp
• William Sharp: "Fiona Macleod", 1855–1905 (1970) Flavia Alaya
• The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study of the Birth of Fiona Macleod, Incorporating Two Lost Works, 'Ariadne in Naxos' and 'Beatrice'" (1996) Terry L. Meyers (Sharp's sexual orientation is a question still to be resolved, but some evidence in William Halloran's edition of Sharp's letters [see below] may corroborate the suggestions by Meyers that the creation of Fiona Macleod in some sense reflected a crisis in Sharp's sexual identity).
• In Library of World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Thirty Volumes, Edited by Charles Dudley Warner, R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, publishers, 1897. In Volume 6 is a section (pp. 3403–3450), devoted to Celtic literature, written by William Sharp and Ernest Rhys.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to William Sharp (writer).

Wikisource has the text of a 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article about William Sharp.

Wikisource has original works by or about:
William Sharp

• Works by William Sharp at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Sharp at Internet Archive
• Works by or about Fiona Macleod at Internet Archive
• Works by William Sharp at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "The Little Book of the Great Enchantment" Biography of William Sharp by Steve Blamires (RJ Stewart Publications 2008)
• Sharp's poems online, volume 1, volume 2^{[permanent dead link]}, volume 3
• Guide to the William Sharp Papers at
  The Bancroft Library
• The William Sharp "Fiona Macleod" Archive containing the Letters of William Sharp "Fiona Macleod" Edited by William F. Halloran, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Sponsored by the Institute of English Studies. University of London
• William Sharp at Library of Congress, with 61 library catalogue records
• Fiona McLeod at Library of Congress, with 42 library catalogue records