William Sharp (Author)
William Sharp (born September 12, 1855 in Paisley in Scotland , † December 12, 1905 in Maniace in Sicily ) was a Scottish writer who published under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod beginning in 1893 and achieved so much greater fame and popularity than his actual names. He was able to keep the secret of his pseudonym throughout his life.
In addition to his writing activities, he was also the editor of the poems of James Macpherson , Walter Scott , Matthew Arnold , Algernon Swinburne and Eugene Lee-Hamilton .
Sharp was born in Paisley, Scotland and trained in Glasgow academy and university. He left the university in 1872 without an academic degree. In the same year he contracted typhoid fever . In 1874 and 1875 he worked for a law firm in Glasgow. When his health deteriorated in 1876, he went on a trip to Australia. On his return in 1878 he took a position in a London bank.
He was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti through Sir Joseph Noel Paton . He joined Rossetti's literary circle, which included Hall Caine , Philip Bourke Marston, and Algernon Swinburne . In 1884 he married his cousin Elizabeth and in 1891 decided to devote himself entirely to writing. Around the same time he developed an intense romantic, but possibly asexual relationship with Edith Wingate Rinder , who was one of the circle of writers around the biologist Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh who were specifically oriented towards Celtic roots. He owed the inspiration to Rinder to write under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod. He dedicated Macleod's first novel Pharais to her in 1894 . In the 1890s, at the height of the Celtic revival, Sharp had a complex and ambivalent relationship with William Butler Yeats , who initially gave the works of the pseudonym far greater recognition than Sharp's, but later understood the identity. For Sharp, the double identity became increasingly a burden. He died in 1905 in Castello di Maniace in Sicily, where he was also buried. In 1910, his widow Elizabeth Sharp published biographical memoirs attempting to explain the need for veiling and published a full edition of his works.
Web links
- Literature by and about William Sharp in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Sharp, William |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Macleod, Fiona |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Scottish writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 12, 1855 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Paisley |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 12, 1905 |
| Place of death | Maniace |