WILLIAM SHARP [pseud. Fiona Macleod, W.H. Brooks] (1855-1905)
Born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1855, William Sharp was the oldest of
eight children. His father was a merchant with a great admiration for the
West Highlands, where the family would summer. Sharp's own
love of nature was enhanced with a mystical bent fostered by the Gaelic singing and
storytelling of one of his childhood nurses. At 18, he spent three months living in
the countryside with a community of gypsies before his parents got him to return
home. At Glasgow University he studied, among
other things, poetry, philosophy, occultism, spiritualism, and folklore. With no
strong sense of career path, he found a trip to Australia via the South Pacific in 1876-77
equally undirected, although it proved creatively stimulating.
He moved to London in 1878 and
quickly became friends with an ever growing community of authors and artists that
included Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893),
Mona Caird (1854-1932), Robert Browning (1812-1889), William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), George Meredith (1828-1909), William Morris (1850-1934), [Walter Pater](#WPA) (1839-1894), [Dante Gabriel Rossetti](#DRO)
(1828-1882), [Olive Schreiner](#OSC) (1855-1920), and [Algernon Swinburne](#ASW) (1837-1909). The influences of Rossetti and
Pater are particularly apparent in his first volume of poetry, The Human Inheritance , The New Hope , Motherhood and Other Poems (1882), although Sharp chose a
Walt Whitman quotation for the book's
epigraph. The poems' settings in various locations including Scotland, England, Australia, and the
South Pacific further distinguish Sharp's interests from
the best known forms of Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism.
The collection also reveals Sharp's early belief in the genus loci (spirit of place)
that, while akin to views offered by Pater and [Vernon
Lee](#VLE), supports a stronger mystical core. The Human
Inheritance suggests a cosmic, cyclical reality that gives rise to
individuals momentarily, only to let them fade. This aspect of his aesthetic is also
apparent in his next two books of poetry, Earth's Voices
(1884) and Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy (1888),
which are characterized by the mysticism and folklore that gained strength as his
career progressed.
Early on, in addition to writing biographies of Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1887), Heinrich Heine (1888), and Robert Browning (1890) and other creative works, he was
also often editing series for publishers or writing articles and essays on contract
with periodicals. He wrote for Good Words, was the managing editor of the Canterbury
Poets series (his first contribution being an anthology of Walter Scott's poetry), and worked for a time as
editor of the Young Folks' Paper.
Sharp's 1891 trip to Italy appears
to have imbued him with a deep appreciation for the Italian landscape as an
embodiment of the natural and mythic. The experience is captured in his
self-published book of free-verse poetry Sospiri di Roma
(1891). In addition to the sexually charged energy in the poems' natural imagery, the
volume also attests to an increased confidence in Sharp's poetic voice. Following
this trip, Sharp entered his most productive decade, demonstrating the greatest
breadth and complexity of his creative talents and philosophic interests. While he
reduced his obligations to various publishers and journal editors, he continued to
produce numerous literary essays, journal articles, short stories, travel sketches,
and other works.
In 1892, Sharp published one of his most remarkable works, The Pagan Review. It was a single-issue journal that rode in
on a wave of popularity for paganism and Celtic history. It turned out Sharp was the
pseudonymous author of all the pieces in the publication, in addition to occupying
the role of editor under the pseudonym of [W.H. Brooks](#WSH). The
manifesto-like introduction positions the project within the Decadent Movement that
was, at the time, making strong inroads from France to Britain. The various
pieces (including Sharp’s [first dramatic work](#TPR_4dr)) reveal an
extremely broad range of knowledge of earth-based spiritualities from around the
world. While some of the elements of the religions are fabricated, the works in The Pagan Review collectively reflect a sincere investment in
suggesting a larger cosmic coherence for the Celtic and pagan nature-based
spirituality that he admired.
In the 1890s, Sharp joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He
also became a central figure of the Edinburgh
group that was part of the movement known as the Celtic Twilight or the Celtic
Revival. Indeed, he became most famous as its ur-authoress "[Fiona
Macleod](#WSH)," the pseudonym under which he ultimately garnered the greatest
attention during his lifetime. That this pseudonym was not just a means of
obfuscation but, in Sharp's view, an aspect of his authorial identity, is reflected
by the fact that, in his early 20s and before his literary career existed, he had
already informed a close friend that "in some things I am more a woman than a man"
(Elizabeth A. Sharp, Memoir 33).
Fiona Macleod was presented to the world as Sharp's protégé, and the facade was
extremely well maintained until his death, in part by having Sharp's sister Mary pen Fiona's correspondences. Sharp envisioned
Macleod as Roman Catholic, but her works evoke a Celtic world that combines images of
idyllic or harsh highland nature with mystical stories of the brave and the
beautiful. The gender and women's issues suggested by Sharp’s choice of a female
pseudonym are readily explored in virtually all of Macleod's novels. The authorial
identities of Sharp and Macleod were both sufficiently successful that, in 1895, the
journal The Evergreen published both of them as
contributors to the same issue.
Sharp suffered from chronic heart and nervous conditions throughout his life. He
died in Sicily in 1905 at the age of
50. After his death and the public announcement of his two literary personae, his
reputation plummeted. Generally, Sharp was assessed for his more popular works as
Macleod and found derivative, condemned for his feminine voice and his unabashed
admiration for the Romantic poets. When Sharp's work under both his own name and his
pseudonyms is interpreted as a single oeuvre, the critiques come across not only as
misogynistic but as an oversimplification of the man's creative innovations.
© 2010, Dennis Denisoff
Dennis Denisoff is Chair and Professor of English at Ryerson University and Co-
Editor of The Yellow Nineties Online. His research focuses on aestheticism,
decadence, paganism, animality, and sexuality.
Selected Publications by William Sharp
As William Sharp
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study. London:
Macmillan, 1882.
Ecce Puella and Other Prose Imaginings. London: Elkin
Matthews, 1896.
The Human Inheritance, The New Hope, Motherhood and Other
Poems . London: Elliott Stock, 1882.
Literary Geography. London: Pall Mall, 1904.
Selected Writings of William Sharp. 5 vols. London:
Heinemann, 1912.
Silence Farm. London: Grant Richards, 1899.
Sospiri di Roma. Rome: Società Laziale, 1891.
As W.H. Brooks
The Pagan Review, I. Rudgwick, Sussex, 1892.
As Fiona Macleod
Green Fire. New York: Harper's, 1896.
The Sin-Eater and Other Tales. Edinburgh: Patrick
Geddes, 1895.
The Mountain Lovers. Keynote Series. London: John
Lane, 1895.
The Washer of the Ford. Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes,
1895.
The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the
Gael. London: Chapman and Hall, 1904.
The Works of Fiona Macleod. 7 vols. London: Heinemann,
1910-1912.
Selected Publications about William Sharp (aka Fiona Macleod)
Alaya, Flavia. William Sharp — "Fiona MacLeod" 1855-1905
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1970.
Halloran, William F. “William Sharp as Bard and Craftsman.” Victorian Poetry 10.1 (Spring 1972): 57-78.
Harris, Jason Marc. Folklore and the Fantastic in
Nineteenth Century British Fiction . Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
Hodd, Thomas. "The Celtic Twilight in Canada: William Sharp's Early Occult
Influence on Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman.” Canadian
Poetry 54 (Spring/Summer 2004): 36-55.
Sharp, Elizabeth A. William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A
Memoir . New York: Duffield, 1910.