William Sharp (writer)

William Sharp photographed in 1894 by Frederick Hollyer.

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 Paisley and educated at Glasgow Academy and the University of Glasgow, 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. In 1878 he took a position in a bank in London.

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 Ducea di Nelson, Bronte, Sicily: the Dukedom donated to Horatio Nelson from Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. 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

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

  1. ↑ Sharp's Death Solves Literary Mystery, NY Times, 15 December 1905
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