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William Sharp (writer)

January 01, 1970

For other people named William Sharp, see William Sharp (disambiguation).

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.

William Sharp
Sharp in 1894
Born(1855-09-12)12 September 1855
Paisley, Scotland
Died12 December 1905(1905-12-12) (aged 50)
Bronte, Sicily
NationalityScottish
Other namesFiona Macleod
OccupationWriter
SpouseElizabeth Sharp

Biography edit

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 Sharp in 1884, and devoted himself to writing full-time from 1891, travelling widely.[2]

Also about this time, he developed an intensely romantic 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.[3] During his Macleod period, Sharp was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.[4] In August 1892, he published what became the only issue of the Pagan Review, in which he, under a set of pen names (including "W. H. Brooks", "W. S. Fanshawe", "George Gascoigne", "Willand Dreeme", "Lionel Wingrave", "James Marazion", "Charles Verleyne", and "Wm. Windover") argued for the establishment of a neo-paganism which would abolish gender inequality. The review was received negatively; among other things, critics wrote that its paganism was far removed from the pagan writings of the ancient world.[5] The Saturday Review wrote:

There can be no better cure for the errors of Neo-paganism than a study of the old pagans, Homer, Sophocles, Virgil. They, not M. Paul Verlaine, not even Mr. George Meredith, not even Beaudelaire (as the Pagan Review calls that author, who himself smote the Neo-Pagans in a memorable essay) are the guides to follow.[5]

He died in 1905 at the Castello di Maniace near Bronte, in Sicily, where he was the guest of Sir Alexander Nelson Hood, 5th Duke of Bronté (1904–1937), and was buried there in the ducal cemetery. He described the duchy and aspects of its history in his Attraverso la Ducea Nelson.[6] 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.

The Belgian Revival edit

Sharp took an early interest in the Belgian avant-garde and disseminated knowledge of La Jeune Belgique movement in a number of essays published in English-language literary periodicals, including two essays entitled La Jeune Belgique, a biographical and critical essay titled Maeterlinck, a reflection on Ruysbroeck and Maeterlinck and a review of Gérard Harry's production of Princess Maleine and The Intruder (1892). He translated Auguste Jenart's The Barbarian (1891) into English. His translation of Charles van Lerberghe's Les Flaireurs was published as The Night-Comers in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal: Autumn in 1895.[7]

Musical Settings edit

The poems of Fiona Macleod attracted the attention of composers in the first half of the 20th century as part of the Celtic Twilight movement in the UK and the US.[8] By far the best known setting was the adaptation of the verse drama The Immortal Hour as the libretto for Rutland Boughton's hugely successful opera of the same name, completed in 1914. The opera ran in London for 216 consecutive performances in 1922, and for a further 160 performances the following year, and was staged in New York City in 1926.[9] It was revived at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London in 1953. The first recording of the complete work, sponsored by The Rutland Boughton Trust, took place in 1983 and was released the following year by Hyperion Records on CD and as a boxed vinyl set.[10]

Other musical settings include:

Works edit

  • 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)
  • The 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)
  • The Immortal Hour, play (1899) as FM
  • 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; this included the poem "The Lonely Hunter", which contains perhaps MacLeod's most famous line: Deep in the heart of Summer, sweet is life to me still, But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill. This inspired the title of Carson McCullers' debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
  • 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
  • Where the forest murmurs: Nature essays (1906) as FM
  • The Immortal Hour (1908) play as FM
  • Selected writings (1912) 5 Vols.
  • The Hills of Ruel, and Other Stories (1921) as FM

References edit

  1. ^ Sharp's Death Solves Literary Mystery, NY Times, 15 December 1905
  2. ^ Pittock, Murray G. H. (2004). "Sharp, William [pseud. Fiona MacLeod] (1855–1905), novelist and mystic". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36041. Retrieved 25 February 2020. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  3. ^ "The William Sharp 'Fiona Macleod' Archive". Institute of English Studies. 13 December 2016. Retrieved 25 February 2020.
  4. ^ "Dennis Denisoff, "The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1888-1901" | BRANCH". Retrieved 25 February 2020.
  5. ^ a b Coste, Bénédicte (2014). "Late-Victorian Paganism: the case of the Pagan Review". Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens (80). doi:10.4000/cve.1533.
  6. ^ "Bronte Insieme/Notizie - Bibliografia". www.bronteinsieme.it. Retrieved 24 September 2020.
  7. ^ Michael Shaw (2019), The Fin-de-Siecle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity, Edinburgh University Press, pp. 97 - 110
  8. ^ Buchan, Matthew. Celtic Twilight's Immortal Hour in British History, Literature, Music, and Culture (2018)
  9. ^ *Warrack, John and West, Ewan (1992), The Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 782 pages, ISBN 0-19-869164-5
  10. ^ Hurd, Michael. Notes to The Immortal Hour, Hyperion CD 22040 (1983)
  11. ^ Songs of Rutland Boughton, BMS431CD (2005)
  12. ^ Chris Sedergreen. Three Songs of Fiona McLeod
  • "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 was likely bi-sexual; William Halloran's edition of Sharp's letters [see below] reverses Halloran's earlier revelation that Sharp fathered a child with Edith Rinder).
  • 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 edit

 
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

January 01, 1970
william, sharp, writer, other, people, named, william, sharp, william, sharp, disambiguation, this, article, includes, list, general, references, lacks, sufficient, corresponding, inline, citations, please, help, improve, this, article, introducing, more, prec. For other people named William Sharp see William Sharp disambiguation This article includes a list of general references but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations March 2019 Learn how and when to remove this message 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 William SharpSharp in 1894Born 1855 09 12 12 September 1855Paisley ScotlandDied12 December 1905 1905 12 12 aged 50 Bronte SicilyNationalityScottishOther namesFiona MacleodOccupationWriterSpouseElizabeth Sharp Contents 1 Biography 2 The Belgian Revival 3 Musical Settings 4 Works 5 References 6 External linksBiography editSharp 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 Sharp in 1884 and devoted himself to writing full time from 1891 travelling widely 2 Also about this time he developed an intensely romantic 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 nbsp 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 3 During his Macleod period Sharp was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 4 In August 1892 he published what became the only issue of the Pagan Review in which he under a set of pen names including W H Brooks W S Fanshawe George Gascoigne Willand Dreeme Lionel Wingrave James Marazion Charles Verleyne and Wm Windover argued for the establishment of a neo paganism which would abolish gender inequality The review was received negatively among other things critics wrote that its paganism was far removed from the pagan writings of the ancient world 5 The Saturday Review wrote There can be no better cure for the errors of Neo paganism than a study of the old pagans Homer Sophocles Virgil They not M Paul Verlaine not even Mr George Meredith not even Beaudelaire as the Pagan Review calls that author who himself smote the Neo Pagans in a memorable essay are the guides to follow 5 He died in 1905 at the Castello di Maniace near Bronte in Sicily where he was the guest of Sir Alexander Nelson Hood 5th Duke of Bronte 1904 1937 and was buried there in the ducal cemetery He described the duchy and aspects of its history in his Attraverso la Ducea Nelson 6 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 The Belgian Revival editSharp took an early interest in the Belgian avant garde and disseminated knowledge of La Jeune Belgique movement in a number of essays published in English language literary periodicals including two essays entitled La Jeune Belgique a biographical and critical essay titled Maeterlinck a reflection on Ruysbroeck and Maeterlinck and a review of Gerard Harry s production of Princess Maleine and The Intruder 1892 He translated Auguste Jenart s The Barbarian 1891 into English His translation of Charles van Lerberghe s Les Flaireurs was published as The Night Comers in The Evergreen A Northern Seasonal Autumn in 1895 7 Musical Settings editThe poems of Fiona Macleod attracted the attention of composers in the first half of the 20th century as part of the Celtic Twilight movement in the UK and the US 8 By far the best known setting was the adaptation of the verse drama The Immortal Hour as the libretto for Rutland Boughton s hugely successful opera of the same name completed in 1914 The opera ran in London for 216 consecutive performances in 1922 and for a further 160 performances the following year and was staged in New York City in 1926 9 It was revived at the Sadler s Wells Theatre in London in 1953 The first recording of the complete work sponsored by The Rutland Boughton Trust took place in 1983 and was released the following year by Hyperion Records on CD and as a boxed vinyl set 10 Other musical settings include Samuel Barber Two Poems of the Wind 1924 Arnold Bax A Celtic Song Cycle 1904 and other songs Rutland Boughton Five Celtic Songs 1910 11 Frederick Delius I Brasil 1913 Christopher Edmunds Kye Song Of Saint Bride for soprano chorus and orchestra 1951 John Foulds Five Mood Pictures 1917 Norman Fulton Three Songs of Fiona McLeod 1962 12 Charles T Griffes Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod 1918 Fritz Hart four volumes of Five Songs opp 73 to 77 Helen Hopekirk Six Poems by Fiona Macleod 1907 and other songs Herbert Howells Five Songs for Low Voice and Piano David Moule Evans Two Celtic Songs 1945 Philip Sainton Leaves Shadows and Dreams Caroline Holme Walker When the Dew is FallingWorks editDante 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 The 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 The Immortal Hour play 1899 as FM 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 this included the poem The Lonely Hunter which contains perhaps MacLeod s most famous line Deep in the heart of Summer sweet is life to me still But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill This inspired the title of Carson McCullers debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 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 Where the forest murmurs Nature essays 1906 as FM The Immortal Hour 1908 play as FM Selected writings 1912 5 Vols The Hills of Ruel and Other Stories 1921 as FMReferences edit Sharp s Death Solves Literary Mystery NY Times 15 December 1905 Pittock Murray G H 2004 Sharp William pseud Fiona MacLeod 1855 1905 novelist and mystic Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 36041 Retrieved 25 February 2020 Subscription or UK public library membership required The William Sharp Fiona Macleod Archive Institute of English Studies 13 December 2016 Retrieved 25 February 2020 Dennis Denisoff The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 1888 1901 BRANCH Retrieved 25 February 2020 a b Coste Benedicte 2014 Late Victorian Paganism the case of the Pagan Review Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens 80 doi 10 4000 cve 1533 Bronte Insieme Notizie Bibliografia www bronteinsieme it Retrieved 24 September 2020 Michael Shaw 2019 The Fin de Siecle Scottish Revival Romance Decadence and Celtic Identity Edinburgh University Press pp 97 110 Buchan Matthew Celtic Twilight s Immortal Hour in British History Literature Music and Culture 2018 Warrack John and West Ewan 1992 The Oxford Dictionary of Opera 782 pages ISBN 0 19 869164 5 Hurd Michael Notes to The Immortal Hour Hyperion CD 22040 1983 Songs of Rutland Boughton BMS431CD 2005 Chris Sedergreen Three Songs of Fiona McLeod 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 was likely bi sexual William Halloran s edition of Sharp s letters see below reverses Halloran s earlier revelation that Sharp fathered a child with Edith Rinder 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 edit nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to William Sharp writer nbsp Wikisource has the text of a 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article about William Sharp nbsp 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 nbsp 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 life and Letters of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod Edited by William F Halloran William Sharp at Library of Congress with 61 library catalogue records Fiona McLeod at Library of Congress with 42 library catalogue records Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title William Sharp writer amp oldid 1222132919, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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