William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod”

William F. Halloran

Description

William Sharp (1855-1905) conducted one of the most audacious literary deceptions of his or any time. A Scottish poet, novelist, biographer, and editor, he began in 1893 to write critically and commercially successful books under the name Fiona Macleod who became far more than a pseudonym. Enlisting his sister to provide the Macleod handwriting, he used the voluminous Fiona correspondence to fashion a distinctive personality for a talented, but remote and publicity-shy woman. Sometimes she was his cousin and other times his lover, and whenever suspicions arose, he vehemently denied he was Fiona. For more than a decade he duped not only the general public but such literary luminaries as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, William Butler Yeats, and E. C. Stedman.

Drawing extensively on his letters, his wife Elizabeth Sharp’s Memoir, and accounts by friends and associates, this biography provides a lucid and intimate account of William Sharp’s life, from his rejection of the dour religion of his Scottish boyhood, his turn to spiritualism, to his role in the Scottish Celtic Revival in the mid-nineties. The biography illuminates his wide network of close male and female friendships, through which he developed advanced ideas about the place of women in society, the constraints of marriage, the fluidity of gender identity, and the complexity of the human psyche. Uniquely this biography reveals the autobiographical content of the writings of Fiona Macleod, the remarkable extent to which Sharp used the feminine pseudonym to disguise his telling and retelling the complex story of his extramarital love affair with a beautiful and brilliant woman.

The biography illuminates not only the talented and conflicted William Sharp, but also the cultural landscape of Great Britain in the late-nineteenth century. From late Pre-Raphaelitism through the "yellow nineties” and on to the excesses of the early twentieth century, Sharp dabbled in all the movements that comprised what some have called the Age of Decadence.

Sujets

• Histoire
• William Sharp (writer)
• William Sharp
• History
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 24 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800643291
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

WILLIAM SHARP AND “FIONA MACLEOD”

William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”
A Life
William F. Halloran





https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2022 William F. Halloran




This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
William F. Halloran, William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”: A Life . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2022, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0276
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations.
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0276#copyright . Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web . Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0276#resources
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
ISBN Paperback: 9781800643260
ISBN Hardback: 9781800643277
ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800643284
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800643291
ISBN Digital ebook (azw3): 9781800643307
ISBN XML: 9781800643314
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0276
Cover image: William Strang, William Sharp (c. 1897), etching, printed by David Strang. Photograph by William F. Halloran of author’s copy (2019).
Cover design: Anna Gatti.

For
Mary Helen Griffin Halloran
intelligence, patience, compassion

Contents

Acknowledgements
ix
Preface
xi
Chapter One: 1855–1881
1
Chapter Two: 1882–1884
9
Chapter Three: 1885–1886
19
Chapter Four: 1887–1888
31
Chapter Five: 1889
43
Chapter Six: 1890
53
Chapter Seven: 1891
61
Chapter Eight: January–June 1892
79
Chapter Nine: July–December 1892
93
Chapter Ten: 1893
111
Chapter Eleven: 1894
127
Chapter Twelve: January–June 1895
147
Chapter Thirteen: July–December 1896
169
Chapter Fourteen: January–June 1896
189
Chapter Fifteen: July–December 1896
205
Chapter Sixteen: 1897
223
Chapter Seventeen: 1898
243
Chapter Eighteen: January–June 1899
265
Chapter Nineteen: July–December 1899
283
Chapter Twenty: 1900
295
Chapter Twenty-One: 1901
315
Chapter Twenty-Two: 1902
333
Chapter Twenty-Three: 1903
349
Chapter Twenty-Four: 1904
365
Chapter Twenty-Five: 1905
387
Appendix 1: William Butler Yeats and Elizabeth Amelia Sharp
413
Appendix 2: Catherine Ann Janvier and Roselle Shields
421
Bibliography
425
List of Illustrations
429
Index
441

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the following for their permissions and their insights: Noel Farquharson Sharp, Rosemarie Fanning Sharp, Robin Sharp, Caroline (Sharp) Schwartz, Esther Mona Harvey, and the Special Collection Librarians of the following institutions:
The American Antiquarian Society; Baylor University’s Armstrong Browning Library; The British Library; The Brown University Library; The Library of Colby College; Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library; The Edinburgh City Libraries; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; The Huntington Library of San Marino California; Indiana University’s Lilly Library; The Library of Congress; The Manx Museum on The Isle of Mann; The National Library of Scotland; The Newberry Library; The New York Public Library’s Berg Collection; New York University’s Fales Library; The Northwestern University Library; The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library; Pennsylvania State University’s Pattee Library; The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City; Princeton University’s Firestone Library; The Sheffield City Archives; The Smith College Library; The Stanford University Library; The State University of New York at Buffalo Library; The Library of Trinity College Dublin; The University of British Columbia Library; The University of California Berkeley’s University Research Library; The University of California Los Angeles’s William Andrews Clark Memorial Library; The University of Delaware Library; The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library; The University of Leeds’s Brotherton Library; The University of Texas Austin’s Library and its Henry Ransom Humanities Research Center; The University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library; Yale University’s Beinecke Library.
This project would not have come to fruition had it not been for Warwick Gould, Emeritus Professor and Founding Director of the Institute for English Studies at the University of London. It was he who supported the first iteration of the Sharp letters as a website supported by the Institute, and it was he who suggested Open Book Publishers as a location for an expanded edition of The Life and Letters of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod . His support and friendship have been a beacon of light.
Finally, and most important, through the many years of my involvement with William Sharp, my wife — Mary Helen Griffin Halloran — has been endlessly patient, encouraging, and supportive. This work has benefited from her insights and her editorial skills.

Preface

© 2022 William F. Halloran, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0276.27
Who Was William Sharp?
William Sharp was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, in 1855. His father, a successful merchant, moved his family to Glasgow in 1867; his mother, Katherine Brooks, was the daughter of the Swedish Vice Consul in Glasgow. A talented, adventurous boy who read voraciously, he spent summers with his family in the Inner Hebrides where he developed a strong attachment to the land and the people. In the summer of 1863, his paternal aunt brought her children from London to vacation with their cousins. Months short of his eighth birthday, Sharp formed a bond with one of those cousins, Elizabeth Sharp, a bright girl who shared many of his enthusiasms. Their meeting led eventually to their engagement (in 1875) and their marriage (in 1884).
After finishing school at the Glasgow Academy in 1871, Sharp studied literature for two years at Glasgow University, an experience that fed his desire to become a writer. Following his father’s sudden death in August 1876, he fell ill and sailed to Australia to recover his health and look for suitable work. Finding none, he enjoyed a warm and adventurous summer and returned in June 1877 to London where he spent several weeks with Elizabeth and her friends. A year later he settled in London and began to establish himself as a poet, journalist, and editor. Through Elizabeth’s contacts and those he made among writers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he became by the end of the 1880s a well-established figure in the literary and intellectual life of the city. During this decade he published biographical studies of Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Robert Browning; three books of poetry; two novels; many articles and reviews; and several editions of other writers. None of those publications brought the recognition he sought. By 1890 he had accumulated enough money to reduce his editing and reviewing and devote more time to poetry and prose.
That autumn he and Elizabeth went to Heidelberg for s