William Sharp (writer)

William Sharp ( * September 12, 1855 in Paisley, Scotland, † December 12, 1905 in Maniace in Sicily ) was a Scottish writer, who achieved starting with published under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod and so far more than 1893 fame and popularity with his actual name. He was able to preserve the secret of his pseudonyms throughout his life.

In addition to his literary career, he worked as editor of the poems of James Macpherson, Walter Scott, Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne and Eugene Lee - Hamilton.

Sharp was born in Scotland and educated in Paisley Glasgow Academy and the University. He left the university in 1872 without a degree. In the same year he suffered a typhoid infection. In the years 1874 and 1875 he worked in a law firm in Glasgow. As his health deteriorated in 1876, he went on a trip to Australia. After his return, he took a position in 1878 at a London bank.

He became acquainted with Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Sir Joseph Noel Paton. He joined Rossetti's literary circle, which includes Hall Caine, Philip Bourke Marston and Algernon Swinburne included. In 1884 he married his cousin Elizabeth, and decided in 1891 to devote himself entirely to writing. Around the same time he developed an intense romantic but possibly asexual relationship with Edith Wingate cattle, which was one of the circle of writers around the biologist Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh, explicitly oriented at Celtic roots. Cattle he owed the inspiration to write under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod. To her he dedicated in 1894 Macleods first novel Pharais. in the 1890s used Sharp at the height of the Celtic revival just as complex as ambivalent about William Butler Yeats, the first of far greater recognition had come to the works of the pseudonym than those Sharps, but later realized the identity. For Sharp, the dual identity became increasingly a burden. He died in 1905 in Castello di Maniace in Sicily, where he was buried. In 1910 his widow Elizabeth Sharp biographical memoirs in which she tried to explain the need for concealment, and published a complete edition of his works.