William Sharp (12 September 1855 – 12 December 1905) was a Scottish

Scotland

Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

 writer, of poetry and literary biography in particular, who from 1893 wrote also as Fiona MacLeod, a pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 kept almost secret during his lifetime. He was also an editor of the poetry of Ossian

Ossian

Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...

, Walter Scott

Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....

, Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a British poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrator...

, Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

 and Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Eugene Lee-Hamilton

Eugene Lee-Hamilton was a late Victorian English poet. His work includes some notable sonnets in the style of Petrarch. He endowed a literary prize administered by Oriel College in Oxford University, where he was a student...

.

Biography

Sharp was born in Paisley and educated at Glasgow Academy and the University of Glasgow

University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow is the fourth-oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of Scotland's four ancient universities. Located in Glasgow, the university was founded in 1451 and is presently one of seventeen British higher education institutions ranked amongst the top 100 of the...

, which he attended 1871-1872 without completing a degree. In 1872 he contracted typhoid. During 1874-5 he worked in a Glasgow law office. His health broke down in 1876 and he was sent on a voyage to Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. In 1878 he took a position in a bank in London.

He was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 by Sir Noel Paton

Joseph Noel Paton

Sir Joseph Noel Paton FRSA, LL. D. was a Scottish artist, born in Wooer's Alley, Dunfermline, Fife.Born to a family of weavers who worked with damask, Joseph continued the family trade for a short time...

, and joined the Rossetti literary group; which included Hall Caine

Hall Caine

Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine CH, KBE , usually known as Hall Caine, was a Manx author. He is best known as a novelist and playwright of the late Victorian and the Edwardian eras. In his time he was exceedingly popular, and at the peak of his success his novels outsold those of his...

, Philip Bourke Marston

Philip Bourke Marston

Philip Bourke Marston was an English poet.He was born in London. His father, John Westland Marston , wrote verse dramas, and was a friend of Dickens, Macready and Charles Kean. Philip's godparents were Philip James Bailey and Dinah Mulock...

 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

Patrick Geddes

Sir Patrick Geddes was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and education....

 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

Celtic Revival

Celtic Revival covers a variety of movements and trends, mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries, which drew on the traditions of Celtic literature and Celtic art, or in fact more often what art historians call Insular art...

. 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

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a magical order active in Great Britain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which practiced theurgy and spiritual development...

.

He died (and is buried) at Castello di Maniace

Castello Maniace

The Castello Maniace is a citadel and castle in Syracuse, Sicily. It stands on a large promontory, where it was constructed between 1232 and 1240 by the Emperor Frederick II. It bears the name of George Maniakes, the Byzantine general who besieged and took the city in 1038.The castle could be...

, Sicily

Sicily

Sicily is a region of Italy, and is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with the surrounding minor islands, it constitutes an autonomous region of Italy, the Regione Autonoma Siciliana Sicily has a rich and unique culture, especially with regard to the arts, music, literature,...

. In 1910, Elizabeth Sharp published a biographical memoir attempting to explain the creative necessity behind the deception, and edited a complete edition of his works.

Works

• 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 Gipsy 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)
• 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)
• 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
  John Goodchild
  John Arthur Goodchild, , was a physician, and later author of several works of poetry and mysticism, most famously Light of the West....
  
  
• The Immortal Hour (1908) play as FM

External links

• "The Little Book of the Great Enchantment" Biography of William Sharp by Steve Blamires (RJ Stewart Publications 2008)
• Sharp's poems online, volume 1
• Sharp's poems online, volume 2
• Sharp's poems online, volume 3
• Guide to the William Sharp Papers at The Bancroft Library
• The Letters of William Sharp 'Fiona Macleod' , ed. William Halloran (2002), available as part of SAS-Space.