Introduction
1 This Introduction is a slightly revised version of the Introduction to Volume 1 of The Life and Letters.
Chapter 12
1 Preceding this letter in the Memoir, Elizabeth Sharp wrote: “At the New Year, 1895, he wrote to a friend.” Following the excerpt, she said, “The strain of the two kinds of work he was attempting to do. The immediate pressure of the imaginative work [by which she meant the work of Fiona Macleod] became unbearable.”
2 Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) was a Scottish poet who, after studying at the University of St Andrews, led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment of the Scottish enlightenment. Many of his extant poems were printed from 1771 onwards in Walter Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine, and a collected works was first published early in 1773. Despite his short life, his career was highly influential, especially through its impact on Robert Burns. He wrote both in Scottish English and the Scots language, and it is his vivid and masterly writing in the latter for which he is principally acclaimed. The brutal circumstances of the poet’s early death prompted the young doctor Andrew Duncan (1744–1828) to pioneer better institutional practices for the treatment of mental health problems through the creation of what is today the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. Wikipedia contributors, “Robert Fergusson,” Wikipedia, 10 January 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fergusson
3 Known as the “Weaver Poet,” Robert Tannahill (1774–1810) wrote poetry in English and lyrics in Scots in the wake of Robert Burns. Working as a weaver in Paisley, his interest in poetry and music blossomed after becoming acquainted with the composer Robert Archibald Smith, who set some of his songs in the Scots language to music. While taking part in the literary life of the town, he helped found the Paisley Burns Club and became its secretary. His work began to appear in periodicals such as The Scots Magazine and in 1807 he published a small collection of poems and songs in an edition of 900 copies which sold out in a few weeks. In 1810, following the rejection of an augmented collection of his work by publishers in Greenock and Edinburgh, he fell into a depression aggravated by fears for his own health, burned all his manuscripts, and drowned himself in a culverted stream under the Paisley Canal. Wikipedia contributors, “Robert Tannahill,” Wikipedia, 15 November 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tannahill
4 Horace Scudder, Childhood in Literature and Art (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894).
5 William Sharp, “Some Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti,” The Atlantic Monthly, 75 (June, 1895), 736–48.
6 The Germ, a Pre-Raphaelite periodical devoted to literature and art, was edited by William M. Rossetti. Four numbers appeared in 1850 during January, February, March, and April. The second two of the four issues were renamed Art and Poetry.
7 This hope was not realized.
8 Thomas A. Janvier, Catherine’s husband.
9 The beginning portion of this letter is missing. Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a Scottish philosopher, sociologist, biologist, and city-planner. He had been Senior Demonstrator of Practical Physiology at University College, London (1877–1878) and Demonstrator of Botany and Lecturer on Zoology at the University of Edinburgh (1880–1889). From 1889–1919, he was Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee. Geddes organized the first student hostel in Scotland at University Hall, Edinburgh in 1887. During the same year, he established a summer school of arts, letters, and science in Edinburgh which continued until 1899 and attracted students and scholars from Great Britain and the continent. In 1894, he transformed a town mansion known as “Laird of Cockpen,” located near the Castle on the Edinburgh High Street, into the Outlook Tower, the first sociological laboratory in the world. Best known for the camera obscura in its tower in which one can view a panorama of the city of Edinburgh, the building is now a museum and library for studying Geddes and his associates. Following its opening in 1894, the building became the locus of the Scottish version of the Celtic Revival. Geddes fostered this movement as a means of furthering his ambition to restore Edinburgh as a major center of learning in Europe. He served as Professor of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay from 1919–1924 and Director of Scots College at Montpelier University from 1924–1932. He contributed in lectures and writings to the theory of sociology and the practice of civics, and devoted nearly twenty years of his life (1894–1914) to planning towns for India. He was also instrumental in designing the Mt. Scopus campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1911, with his life-long friend, Victor Branford, Geddes outlined a series of books called “The Making of the Future” wherein they would explain to English-speaking people the causes and the nature of the disastrous war he thought would break out by 1915. Among Geddes works are Evolution of Sex with J. Arthur Thomson (1889), Cities in Evolution (1915), and Ideas at War (1917). The Sharps met the Geddes in the fall of 1894, and they became close friends. Geddes employed Sharp variously in his publishing firm, which Sharp used as a vehicle for the publication of his books and those of his friends. Wikipedia contributors, “Patrick Geddes,” Wikipedia, 9 February 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Geddes
10 Amyl Nitrate dilates blood vessels and was used to relieve the pain of angina by expanding the vessels in the heart. Since suffering rheumatic fever as a young man, Sharp’s heart was weak and subject to periodic angina attacks. Geddes must have given Sharp some amyl nitrate capsules to use when he felt an angina attack coming on.
11 The Sharps went to Ventnor on Sunday January 6 and returned to London on Friday January 18. This letter was written on Tuesday January 15.
12 Geddes wrote “21/1/5-” at the top of this letter and made many notes on the pages as he read them. Sharp’s “Monday” establishes the letter’s date.
13 The publishing firm of P. G. Geddes and Colleagues was established in 1895. As this letter makes clear, it was designed as a medium for the expression and dissemination of Celtic-oriented poems and stories and of scientific works that would help to restore Edinburgh’s reputation as a center of learning. William Sharp served briefly as Manager of the firm and then became its Literary Adviser. He saw the firm as a vehicle for his writings, and under his guidance, it published beautifully designed editions of Fiona Macleod’s The Sin-Eater (1895), The Washer of the Ford (1896), and From the Hills of Dream (1896). These were followed by Fiona’s Songs and Tales of St. Columba and His Age (1897), and The Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod (1897), a rearrangement and reissue in three inexpensive paper-covered volumes of the stories published in The Sin-Eater and The Washer of the Ford. The firm’s most successful publication, a book that went through several editions, was an anthology of Celtic poetry called Lyra Celtica (1896) which Elizabeth Sharp compiled and edited and for which William Sharp wrote a lengthy introduction and copious notes.
14 The Chap-Book.
15 J. Arthur Thomson (1858–1935) was Professor of Human Anatomy at Oxford (1893), Lecturer on Anatomy in Relation to Art at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy (1900–1934). He also served as Representative of the University of Oxford on the General Medical Council (1904–1929). Besides co-authoring The Evolution of Sex (1889) with P. G. Geddes, Thomson wrote Biology for Everyman (1935), The Biology of the Seasons (1911), Darwinism and Human Life (1909), and Heredity (1911).
16 Edinburgh.
17 William Angus Knight (1836–1916) was a Scotsman and professor of moral philosophy at the University of St. Andrews from 1867–1902. His many publications include Poems from the Dawn of English Literature to the Year 1699 (1863), Studies in Philosophy and Literature (1879), Wordsworth’s Prose (1893), and Some Nineteenth Century Scotsmen (1902).
18 This was published in November 1895 by Stone and Kimball in Chicago, and by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in Edinburgh. It was advertised in The Chap-Book, 3 (November 1, 1895).
19 Sharp became dissatisfied with Greenfire, which he published as the work of Fiona Macleod and dedicated to Edith Rinder. He rewrote the “Highland” portion of the book, “named it ‘The Herdsman,’ and included it in Fiona Macleod’s The Dominion of Dreams in 1899” (Memoir, p. 276).
20 Fiona Macleod’s “From the Hebrid Isles” appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 92 (December, 1895), 45–60.
21 There is no evidence that Sharp completed this article.
22 George Santayana, Sonnets (Chicago and Cambridge: Stone & Kimball, 1894); probably Gilbert Parker, A Lover’s Diary: Songs in Sequence (Chicago and Cambridge: Stone & Kimball; 1894); probably Hamlin Garland, Prairie Folks (Chicago: F. J. Schulte and Company, 1893).
23 Joseph Pennell (1857–1926) was an American artist and writer who lived in England. Among his publications are A Canterbury Pilgrimage (1885), Modern Illustration (1895), The Life of James McNeill Whistler (1907), and The Graphic Arts (1922).
24 “Some Personal Reminiscences of Walter Pater,” The Atlantic Monthly, 74 (December, 1894), 801–14.
25 William Sharp, “John Addington Symonds,” The Atlantic Monthly, 47 (February, 1895), 95–6.
26 Sharp, “Some Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti.”
27 Here, Sharp indicates that the editor of the Academy has agreed to accept an article by him on Scudder’s Childhood in Literature and Art. This article did not materialize.
28 Sharp, “John Addington Symonds.”
29 Frederick Shields.
30 Paul Verlaine, The Poems of Paul Verlaine, trans. by Gertrude Hall (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895). This was actually the fourth title issued in the Green Tree Library Series.
31 This volume did not appear.
32 See letter To Herbert Stuart Stone, December 31, 1894 (Volume 1) for contents and final ordering of The Gypsy Christ.
33 Sharp was working on the Fiona Macleod stories that appeared in The Sin-Eater and Other Tales.
34 This quarterly materialized not as “The Celtic World,” as proposed here by Sharp, but as The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal. As Sharp suggested, there is no editor given on the title page. It reads simply: “Published in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues | in London by T. Fisher Unwin, and | in America by J. B. Lippincott Co.” The first of four projected parts simply called Spring was published in the spring of 1895 with a “proem” by William Macdonald and J. Arthur Thomson. Part II (Autumn) appeared in the fall of 1895, and Part III (Summer) and Part IV (Winter) in 1896. See note 13 above to Sharp’s letter to Patrick Geddes dated April 27, 1895.
35 J. Stanley Little recently married the Viscomtess Fanny Maude Therese de la Blache. For more information on J. Stanley Little, see Endnote 49, Chapter 3 (Volume 1).
36 Mrs. Alden was very ill, and this letter, the first part of which is missing, was an effort to lift her spirits and provide some comfort. Her son-in-law, Joyce Kilmer, dedicated his famous poem “Trees” to her.
37 Henry Mills Alden, God in His World: An Interpretation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890).
38 The frustration expressed by Sharp in this letter at the lack of communication from Stone is an early indication the Stone and Kimball firm was having difficulties. Stone’s father, whose money helped start the firm, was not pleased that expenses continued to outweigh revenues, and Stone himself was beginning to tire of the endless details of running a business. Furthermore, stresses had begun to develop between the two young partners.
39 Sir Thomas Barclay (1853–1941), a journalist who became a barrister, moved to Paris in 1888 to join a small group of British lawyers practicing there. An advocate of arbitration and conciliation, he became an expert in international law. He served as President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Paris in 1899–1900 and as an Honorary President of the Institute of International Law in 1919. For the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he wrote the sections on International Law, Neutrality, Peace and several related subjects. One of Patrick Geddes’s aims was to reestablish close ties between Scotland and France as a means of reasserting Edinburgh’s prominence as a center of learning. Geddes asked Sharp to explore with Barclay in Paris the possibility of his assisting in the establishment of a Franco-Scottish College to jump start closer ties between France and Scotland. Not one to abandon a cause, Geddes persisted until, in 1924, he helped establish Scots College, a residence hall for Scottish and other foreign students, at Montpelier University in France, for which he subsequently served as Director for eight years. Wikipedia contributors, “Thomas Barclay (economic writer),” Wikipedia, 8 June 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barclay_(economic_writer)
40 Phoebe Anna Traquair was married to Ramsay Heatley Traquair (1840–1912), a friend of Geddes and a Scottish naturalist and paleontologist who served for thirty-three years as Keeper of the Natural History Collections at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. Wikipedia contributors, “Ramsay Traquair,” Wikipedia, 25 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay_Heatley_Traquair
41 William Macdonald was an aspiring poet who Geddes asked to assemble and oversee the publication the first volume of The Evergreen, the journal which Sharp proposed to Geddes in his letter of March 3, 1895. Macdonald and J. Arthur Thomson, a biologist friend of Geddes, signed the seven-page “Proem,” or introduction, to that volume, but Geddes’s influence is apparent throughout, as evidenced in its concluding sentence: “The music of the coming Renascence is heard so far only in ‘broken snatches,’ but in these snatches four chords are sounded, which we would fain carry in our hearts – That faith may be had still in the friendliness of fellows; that the love of country is not a lost cause; that the love of women is the way of life; and that in the eternal newness of every Child is an undying promise for the Race.” Macdonald contributed two poems to the first volume of The Evergreen and one poem to each of the succeeding three volumes. Sharp’s opinion of this first Evergreen is contained in his letter to Patrick Geddes, May 15, 1895. Wikipedia contributors, “Arthur Thomson (naturalist),” Wikipedia, 8 July 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Arthur_Thomson
42 James Campbell Irons (1840–1910) was the author of The Burgh Police Act (1893), The Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll (1896), Leigh and Its Antiquities (1893), and The Law and Practice in Scotland Relative to Judicial Factors (1908). Wikipedia contributors, “James Campbell Irons,” Wikipedia, 16 November 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Campbell_Irons
43 Sir Thomas Barclay. See Endnote 39.
44 For Irons, see Endnote 42. Victor Branford (1864–1931), a London banker, sociologist, and historian, was a life-long friend of Patrick Geddes, and he co-authored with him a series of books on the problems of war and peace under the general title “The Making of the Future.” The three main books of the series are The Coming Polity (1917), Ideas at War (1917), and Our Social Inheritance (1919). He also wrote The Life of Frederic Le Play (1931), An Atlas of Chemistry (1889), and The Coal Crisis and the Future (1926). The latter was co-authored with P. Abercrombie, C. Desch, P. Geddes, C. W. Salerby, and E. Kilburn Scott.
45 Geddes has written on the letter: “Press for July – Agreed 23/5/5 for the Autumn.” This indicates that Sharp and Geddes were together on 23 May, and that Sharp agreed to place Fiona Macleod’s The Sin-Eater with Patrick Geddes and Colleagues.
46 The Sin-Eater and Other Tales was published in the fall of 1895 by Stone and Kimball in Chicago, and by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in Edinburgh.
47 The first edition of Lyra Celtica, with a long introductory essay by W. S. and edited by E. A. S., was published in the fall of 1895 by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in Edinburgh. I have found no record of Musa Catholica.
48 Here Geddes wrote: “Not now.” Sharp had proposed as the firm’s first publication a book either by or about Robert Louis Stevenson who died in 1894, but that proposal did not materialize. Sharp habitually looked upon the death of a writer as an opportunity to write about the author or publish the author’s work. This trait prompted Oscar Wilde, following the publication of books about Daniel Gabriel Rossetti by both Sharp and Hall Caine in the year following Rossetti’s death, to remark, “When a great man dies, Sharp and Caine go in with the undertaker.”
49 The references here are to James Campbell Irons’ Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll and J. Arthur Thomson’s Heredity. The former was published in 1896 by Edward Stanford University (London), and Heredity was published by John Murray (London) in 1909.
50 Here Geddes wrote: “Discuss in August.” This book did not materialize. Sharp may have intended it be the series of lectures he was scheduled to present at Geddes’s summer school in August 1895. If so, Geddes wanted to hear them before agreeing to publish them as a book. Sharp collapsed during his first lecture with what E. A. S. said was a heart attack and did not complete the others.
51 Here Geddes wrote: “Mrs. Mona Caird – Agreed 23/5/5.” Sharp suggested yet another close friend to produce a book for the publishing firm when he and Geddes met in May. Mona Caird was a popular spokesperson for the rights of women, especially for granting women the right to vote and equal legal rights within the marriage contract.
52 Neither series materialized.
53 Jonas Lie (1833–1908) was a Norwegian novelist. Among his works are Den Fremsynte (1870), Tremasteren Fremtideneller, eller Liv nordpå (1872), Lodsen og hans Hustru (1879), Rutland (1881). Ola Hansson (1860–1925) was a Swedish poet, narrative writer, and essayist. Among his works are a collection of poems, Dikter (1884), a novella collection, Sensitiva amorosa (1887), and the novels Resan hem (1894), Vägen till livet (1896), and Rustgården (1910). Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863–1938) was an Italian poet, playwright, novelist, propagandist, military leader, and eccentric. Among his works are the novels The Triumph of Death (1896), The Maiden of the Rocks (1898), The Flame of Life (1900), and the plays The Dead City (1902), La Gioconda (1902), and The Honeysuckle (1915). Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911) was an Italian novelist and poet who wrote The Patriot (1907), The Saint (1907), The Woman (1907), The Politician (1908), Leila (1901). Matilde Serao (1856–1927) was an Italian novelist whose works include La conquista di Roma: Romanzo (1885), Addio, amore! (1897), and La Bellerina: Romanzo (1901). José Eschegaray y Eizaguirre (1832–1916) was a Spanish dramatist who wrote La Esposa del Vengador (1874), El Estigma (1876), and El Loco Dios (1908). Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) was a well-known German author who wrote Heimat (1893), Morituri (1897), Frau Sorge (1888), Die Drei reiherfedern (1898), Drei Reden Gehalten (1900), Die Ehre (1900), Das Hohe Lied (1908), Die entgötterte Welt (1916). Anatole France (1844–1924) was a French novelist and critic whose books include L’Etui de Nacre (1892), La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893), Le Jardin d’Epicure (1895), Thais (1909). Between 1886 and 1891, he was the literary critic for Le Temps, producing a mass of highly subjective criticism which appeared in book form as La Vie Litteraire Sur La Vole Glorieuse (1914). The Human Tragedy (1917), The Mummer’s Tale (1921), and Latin Genius (1924) are some of his better-known works. J. H. Rosny (pseudonym of the brothers Joseph-Henri (1856–1940) and Seraphin Justin (1859–1948) Boex) wrote the novels Nell Horn, de l’Armée du Salut (1886), Le Bilatéral (1887), La Termite (1890), and La Fauve (1899). Georges Eekhoud (1854–1927) was a Belgian poet and novelist whose publications include Kees Doorik; Les Dermesses (1884); La Nouvelle Carthage (1888); and La Faneuse d’Amour. His novels treat social issues of the urban working class and peasants. In the 1880s he worked with the publication La Jeune Belgique in an effort to breathe life into Belgian literature. Camille Lemonnier (1845–19l3) was a Belgian novelist and art critic who wrote in French and was connected with the review La Jeune Belgique. Among his writings are Contes flamands et wallons (1873), Happe-chair (1886), Un Mâle (1892), Au cœur frais de la forêt (1899), Le Vent dans les Moulins (1900), and Le Petit Homme de Dieu (1903). Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) was an American novelist and essayist who wrote Main Travelled Roads (1890), Crumbling Idols (1894), The Life of Ulysses S. Grant (1898), A Son of the Middle Border (1917), Roadside Meetings (1930), and Forty Years of Psychic Research (1936).
54 Date from postmark.
55 Deò-grein translates as “ray of sunshine,” and refers to Anna Geddes.
56 George Cotterell (1839–1898) was an English poet, who edited the Yorkshire Herald, and reviewed poetry and fiction for The Academy. He published Constantia, and Other Poems (London: Provost, 1870), The Banquet: A Political Satire (London: W. Blackwood, 1885), and Poems: Old and New (London: D. Nutt, 1894).
57 John Duncan (1866–1931) was a Scots artist who became a central figure in the revival of interest in Celtic art. He was a protégé of Geddes and with him founded the Edinburgh School of Art, which flourished between 1892 and 1900. He and Geddes executed a number of panels and murals depicting Celtic figures of legend and history for the dining and common rooms of Ramsey Lodge and St. Giles House, a student hostel near the Castle in Edinburgh. In the Spring number of The Evergreen, Duncan contributed, in addition to Celtic designs, several plates in black and white that were influenced by Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings for The Yellow Book.
58 James Cadenhead (1858–1927) was employed by Geddes to paint the Edinburgh Room of Ramsey Lodge with friezes portraying the main features of the city. He also contributed black-and-white head and tail pieces to The Evergreen.
59 Unable to identify.
60 Robert Burns (1869–1941) was a Scottish landscape and figure painter, illustrator and designer. He was the Director of Painting at the Edinburgh College of Art.
61 Aubrey Beardsley (1874–1898) is best known for the illustrations he contributed to various periodicals of the fin de siècle, among them the Yellow Book and the Savoy, and for the drawings he executed for Le Morte d’Arthur (1893), Salome (1894), and The Rape of the Lock (1896).
62 The Yellow Book was a periodical published in book form. It offered a comprehensive view of the literary movements of the 1890s and provided the best examples of fin de siècle art. It was named for its brilliant yellow cover. The first number was published in April 1894 with Henry Harland as literary editor and Aubrey Beardsley as art editor.
63 T. & A. Constable, Ltd. (London) served as a secondary publisher and distributor of The Evergreen.
64 Sharp is referring to himself as “Porporsia Celtica.”
65 Sharp wrote this letter from London shortly before he went to York on Saturday May 18 and on to Dundee on Monday May 20 to stay with the Geddes.
66 Cartledge Hall was the Gilchrist’s family home in Holmesfield, where his mother and sisters lived. In the summer of 1895, Gilchrist and his companion George Garfitt moved from their house – Highcliffe in Eyam – to Cartledge Hall where they lived with Gilchrist’s sisters until he died in 1917. Sharp’s approval of his “going over to Cartledge,” refers to that move, since a reference in his next letter to Gilchrist suggests that Cartledge is now, or will shortly be, his home. For more information about Gilchrist, see the “Life” section of Chapter 9 (Volume 1) for more information.
67 This letter from E. A. S is included to demonstrate the intense concern she felt about the physical and mental state of her husband, and as an indication of the generosity Patrick Geddes and his wife demonstrated to the Sharps. E. A. S. and the Geddes shared a hope that providing Sharp a salaried position with the fledgling publishing company would provide sufficient income to enable him to reduce the amount of time he had to spend writing articles and reviews. After Sharp left the Geddes’s home in Dundee on May 22 for the west of Scotland, Geddes wrote to E. A. S. to express his concern about Sharp’s health and to offer to alleviate his need to write for money by providing a stipend from the publishing firm. He mentioned that Sharp was suffering from back pain, and here Elizabeth says she will put him in a doctor’s hands to treat the back problem when he returns. When he did return, Sharp told Geddes in a letter of 4 June: “I am sorry you wrote exigently about my health – & particularly about my back.” He did not want to worry Elizabeth about this particular ailment.
68 Geddes invited Sharp to give a series of twelve lectures in August at his Summer School in Edinburgh. According to E. A. S., Sharp “was seized with a severe heart attack” during his first lecture (“Life & Art: Art & Nature: Nature”). He finished that lecture with great difficulty, canceled the remaining lectures, and repaired to the Pettycur Inn across the Firth of Forth to recover while his wife stayed on in the flat they had taken for the month of August in Ramsay Gardens “to keep open house for the entertainment of the students.” See letter To J. Stanley Little, [early August, 1895] (Volume 2) and its accompanying endnote.
69 Rutland House | Greencroft Gardens | So. Hampstead is printed on the stationery. Sharp told Gilchrist in the previous letter that he would be going back to London “somewhere about Whitsuntide,” or a few days after May 26. The return addresses of that letter indicated he would be staying with the Geddes at Dundee on the nights of May 20–22 and leaving on May 23. This letter indicates that Sharp came to Edinburgh overnight, after spending a few days in the west of Scotland near Loch Fyne. He returned to London on Wednesday May 29, and told Geddes on June 4 that he had spent four glorious days (May 17–20) at a remote place on Loch Fyne. His description of his experience in the west – “the dream is over,” etc. – suggests that he may have been joined by Edith Rinder for this brief interlude. That suggestion is supported by the ecstatic “Paganism” and promise “to be good” in the letter to Geddes.
70 Unable to identify.
71 The Washer of the Ford: Legendary Moralities and Barbaric Tales was published by Stone and Kimball in early 1896.
Chapter 13
1 The Allens lived in a house called “The Croft,” in Hindhead, Haslemere, Surrey. A free thinker and a prolific writer, he had many friends in the London literary establishment. He became famous in 1895 with the publication of The Woman Who Did, a novel about a woman who refused to marry her lover because of the unfairness of the marriage laws. The novel was both widely attacked and satirized, and widely praised by advocates of women’s rights. For more information about Grant Allen, see Sharp’s letter To Richard Le Gallienne, [May 22, 1888] (Volume 1).
2 The lectures for Patrick Geddes’s Summer School in Edinburgh in August 1895.
3 Date from postmark.
4 Recently married to the Viscomtess Fanny Maude Therese de la Blache, Little had apparently suffered a loss with financial implications, perhaps the loss of his job as a reporter/columnist on the West Sussex Gazette.
5 The first portion of this letter is missing. Its approximate date is established by Sharp’s statement that he hears The Mountain Lovers has been published but has not seen a copy. It was published by John Lane (London) on 9 July 1895.
6 Sharp’s Ecce Puella and Other Prose Imaginings was published on November 1, 1895 by Elkin Matthews in London and simultaneously by Stone and Kimball in Chicago. See Sharp’s letter To Edward Clodd, November 2, 1895 (Volume 2). At least some copies of the edition carry the date 1896.
7 “Fragments from the Lost Journal of Piero di Cosimo,” The Scottish Art Review (June, 1890).
8 Sharp wrote “Fair Women in Painting and Prose” for P. G. Hamerton’s Portfolio of Artistic Monographs (London: Seeley and Company, 1894).
9 “Love in a Mist,” Good Words, 34 (December, 1893), 845–50.
10 Copeland and Day Publishing Company in Boston.
11 Sharp signed the English and American rights for Ecce Puella with Elkin Matthews on the condition that Matthews give first offer for American publication to Stone and Kimball.
12 The Gypsy Christ and other Tales (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895).
13 The Mountain Lovers.
14 The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales by Belgian Writers (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1895) was a collection of Belgian stories translated and introduced by Edith Wingate Rinder.
15 The Mountain Lovers.
16 Meredith replied to this letter on July 13. He apologized to Fiona for not having acknowledged Pharais (“a gift to our literature”) the previous year due to the press of his work. The “book on the Mountains” promises “as richly.” And he added “Be sure that I am among those readers of yours whom you kindle.”
17 Sharp’s Vistas (1894) and The Gypsy Christ (1895).
18 Edward Clodd (1840–1930) worked for the London Joint Stock Bank from 1870–1915. A prolific writer, a friend of Charles Darwin, a folklorist, and chair of the Rationalist Press Association from 1906–1913, he was a close friend of Grant Allen. He published Grant Allen: A Memoir in 1900, the year after Allen died. Among his other books are The Childhood of the World (1873), The Childhood Religions (1875), Jesus of Nazareth (1886), A Primer of Evolution (1895), Tom Tit Tot: An Essay on Savage Philosophies in Folk Tale (1898), The Story of the Alphabet (1900), and Animism: Seed of Religion (1905).
19 This individual is yet to be identified.
20 Sharp must have mentioned a rumor about Grant Allen and “a literary Parisian” that upset Mrs. Allen and proved to be untrue.
21 Marie Adelaide (Belloc) Lowndes (1868–1947) was a translator and prolific author. Besides translating The de Goncourt Journals in 1895, she wrote many novels, among them Another Man’s Wife (1934), And Call It An Accident (1936), After the Storm (1941).
22 James Sutherland Cotton, editor of The Atheneum.
23 Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s Magazine in New York, was a friend of Sharp’s. Sharp had recommended Allen’s stories or novels for American publication by Stone and Alden.
24 The reference must be to the manuscript of Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did which Lane published later in 1895. Perhaps Allen originally intended to publish it pseudonymously, and Lane had inadvertently made that difficult by telling someone Allen was the author.
25 Many well-known writers were members of the Omar Khayyam Club which was dedicated, as its name suggests, to good food and wine and convivial companionship. This dinner was held at Burford Bridge, an historic hotel in the village of Mickleham south of Box Hill in Surrey. Edward Clodd, President of the Omar Khayyam Club, had enticed his friend George Meredith, who lived on Box Hill, to attend. Meredith was famously reticent about appearing and speaking in public. He did not arrive until the dessert course was being served whereupon Clodd welcomed him in a “charming and eloquent speech.” Realizing he was the guest of honor, Meredith expressed his appreciation in a witty talk. For more about Clodd see note Sharp letter To Mrs. Grant Allen, July 11, 1895 (Volume 2). Sharp became a member of the Omar Khayyam Club in the fall of 1895 upon Clodd’s recommendation (Memoir, p. 246). See Sharp’s letter To Edward Clodd, November 2, 1895 (Volume 2), in which he expressed his appreciation for Clodd’s recommendation.
26 Le Gallienne was staying with Grant Allen in Surrey in early summer 1894 when a copy of Pharais arrived for Allen to read and review. Le Gallienne recognized in the work an image that had appeared in a Sharp poem and said to Allen “I’ll bet you anything that ‘Fiona Macleod’ is no one else but — William Sharp.” Though somewhat suspicious, Allen accepted Fiona at face value and praised the book in the Westminster Gazette. Le Gallienne, however, said in his review of Pharais in The Star, “Either Miss Macleod is plagiarizing or William Sharp is masquerading as Fiona Macleod.” When he saw the review Sharp sent Le Gallienne a telegram saying, “For God’s Sake, shut your mouth” and then a letter promising an explanation when they next met (Romantic 90’s). When Le Gallienne reviewed Fiona’s Mountain Lovers in The Star in early July 1895, he again hinted that Fiona Macleod was a pseudonym and again Sharp asked him not to raise that suspicion. Sharp was trying to arrange a meeting with Le Gallienne to “explain” about Fiona Macleod, but his letter To Richard le Gallienne, July 15, 1895 (Volume 2) indicates the meeting would probably have to wait until later in the year when Le Gallienne returned from America.
27 A “retouched” version of the first English edition of Pharais (Derby: Frank Murray, 1894) was published by Stone and Kimball in 1895. By making slight changes in the text, it was possible to obtain a separate U.S. copyright. Simultaneous publication of Fiona Macleod’s collection of tales (The Sin-Eater) in November 1895 by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in Edinburgh and Stone and Kimball in Chicago assured copyright in both countries. Stone had gone from London to Paris where, presumably, he planned to stay for a time.
28 This copy is in the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection in the University of Delaware Library. Mr. Lasner has kindly sent me the inscription, which reads: “Dear Mrs. Gilchrist, Give me pleasure by accepting this new book by my most intimate friend & closest comrade, Fiona Macleod — whose acquaintance you have already made in Pharais. She does not forget your kind letter, and wants to meet you, and her unknown friend Robert Murray Gilchrist, in good time. Her salutations and my cordial regard to you both. William Sharp 1895.”
29 Meredith was the guest of honor at this dinner. He may have been the “leading genius” in attendance, but he did not preside. See note to Sharp’s letter To Richard Le Gallienne, July 11, 1895 (Volume 2).
30 Printing this letter in her Memoir (pp. 230–31), Elizabeth omitted the second paragraph.
31 The Mountain Lovers.
32 These words of praise by Meredith are in a letter dated July 13, 1895 which is reproduced in the Memoir (pp. 245–46).
33 Sharp will be in Scotland alone but not in Edinburgh the last week of July before Elizabeth joins him in Edinburgh for the Summer Session in Ramsay Gardens. The likelihood is that he was not alone but in St. Andrews — about an hour north of Edinburgh — accompanied by Edith Rinder.
34 William Strang (1859–1921), painter and sculptor, was President of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers from 1918 to 1921. He won the Silver Medal for Etching at the Paris International Exhibition in 1889 and the First Class Gold Medal for Painting at the Dresden International Exhibition in 1897. A copy of Strang’s fine etching of William Sharp (1896) is the frontispiece for E. A. S.’s Memoir.
35 The Sin-Eater was printed in Edinburgh by W. H. White and Company, The Riverside Press.
36 This ambitious list of the lectures Sharp planned to deliver in Edinburgh is copied from Memoir, p. 251. Since it is doubtful that Sharp had more than rough notes on any of them, his collapse during the first, as reported by E. A. S., may have been a fortunate act of avoidance.
37 These three poems appeared in Le Gallienne’s Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Poems (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895).
38 Ecce Puella and Other Prose Imaginings which was published on 1 November 1895.
39 Henry Alden’s wife and Miss Alden’s mother had recently died following a long and debilitating illness.
40 This story was “Mary of the Gael,” which appeared first in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Autumn (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 1895) and then in The Washer of the Ford (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 1896) where it was called “Muime Chriosd,” or “Foster-Mother of Christ”. Sharp had sent the story to Mrs. Alden as his own work, but it appeared both in The Evergreen and in The Washer of the Ford as the work of Fiona Macleod. It is evident that Sharp had told Alden and his family that Fiona Macleod was William Sharp.
41 A book by Henry Mills Alden published in 1890.
42 Alden’s A Study of Death (New York: Harper Bros.) was published in December, 1895.
43 Allen’s review of The Mountain Lovers appeared in the Westminster Gazette in late July. Sharp had Mary copy this letter when he passed through Edinburgh and mailed it from St Andrews. The ALS in the Pierpont Morgan Library Library is in the Fiona handwriting.
44 The Sin-Eater and Other Tales.
45 This review appeared in The Bookman, 8 (August, 1895), 146–67.
46 Athenaeum, 106/3536 (August 3, 1895), 156.
47 This loss was clearly more serious than that mentioned in Sharp’s letter To J. Stanley Little, July 9, 1895 (Volume 2). It may have been the death of one of his parents.
48 According to E. A. S. (Memoir, p. 251), Sharp collapsed during his first lecture, barely finished it, and was unable to present the others.
49 In the following letter Sharp has Fiona staying with him in Ramsey Gardens for easy communication between the two regarding Stone and Kimball’s publication of Pharais and The Sin-Eater. Sharp had continued easy access to the Fiona handwriting for further Fiona letters to Stone, since his sister Mary was nearby in Edinburgh, and she then traveled with the Sharps and Fiona in the West. The return address of this letter and others suggests that Sharp returned to Ramsay Gardens at least once in August. If Elizabeth is accurate in her recollection that Sharp collapsed after his first lecture, retired across the Firth of Forth to the Pettycur Inn, and delivered no more, then he would not have delivered a lecture on “The Celtic Renascence” as he claims in the next letter.
50 Although this letter is undated, internal evidence implies it was sent at the same time as the previous letter (the Fiona letter of August 12, 1895).
51 This article appeared as “A Note on the Belgian Renaissance,” The Chap-Book (December, 1895), 149–57. It was intended to promote not Fiona’s The Sin Eater, but Edith Rinder’s The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales.
52 The remainder of the manuscript is missing.
53 Three British publishers.
54 The Gypsy Christ (1895).
55 Sharp had returned briefly from the Pettycur Inn to the flat the Sharps had taken for the month of August in Edinburgh. They left the next day for the cottage they had let in the Kyles of Bute.
56 The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales.
57 The Canadian poet Bliss Carman was a mutual friend. Stone had been in London and Paris earlier in the summer.
58 When he was in London, Stone must have met Theodore Watts, as he was then known, and arranged to publish a volume of his poems. Apparently Sharp was to receive a proof copy of the volume so he could promote the book by writing an article in Stone and Kimball’s Chap-Book. Plans for the volume fell through, and Sharp did not write the article. He did write a note on the Belgian literary renascence for the December 1895 edition of The Chap-Book, in which he lavishly praised Edith Rinder’s “Belgium book.” Watts-Dunton’s first volume of poems was The Coming of Love | Rhona Boswell’s Story | And Other Poems which was published by John Lane at the Bodley Head (London and New York) in 1897. It was a sequel to his prose Aylwin, which appeared a year later (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1898). Both volumes went through many editions and established Watts-Dunton’s reputation as a writer. Watts appended Dunton, his mother’s maiden name, to his surname when he published The Coming of Love. That addition caused many of his friends, including William Sharp, to wonder what they should call him. James MacNeil Whistler is reported to have written to him as “Theodore” and asked “What’s Dunton?”
59 Here, amazingly, Sharp tells Stone not only that Edith Rinder is Fiona’s most intimate woman friend, but that Edith and Fiona have been “staying together recently.” Since Sharp claimed to become Fiona Macleod when he and Edith were alone together, the statement lends support to the probability that Sharp and Edith were “staying together,” probably in St. Andrews, during the last week of July. This passage is also interesting for its broaching — and then discounting — the possibility of some collaboration between Sharp and Edith Rinder on both the Fiona Macleod writings, and the writing Edith was doing on continental literature. The Rinders, both of whom had deep roots in Scotland, were staying somewhere in Fifeshire in August. Edith probably helped Sharp recuperate at the Pettycur Inn following his angina attack in Edinburgh. She also seems to have visited the Sharps at Ramsay Gardens in Edinburgh briefly in late August on her way to Brittany “to work up Breton legends and folklore.” Those tales formed the basis of her The Shadows of Arvor, which Patrick Geddes and Colleagues published in 1896 upon the recommendation of the firm’s Literary Editor, William Sharp.
60 The Gypsy Christ was not published in England until 1897 (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co.), when it bore the title Madge o’ the Pool: The Gypsy Christ and other Tales.
61 The Sin-Eater and Other Tales.
62 This letter is written on The Evergreen letterhead, but that name and the printed return address (Patrick Geddes & Colleagues | Riddles Court Lawnmarket | Edinburgh) are crossed through. Sharp initially thought Stone’s letters should go to him in Edinburgh. Then he decided they should go to his London address. Perhaps his use of the letter-head stationary was meant to assure Stone that he was closely associated with the firm and able to act for the firm regarding the publication of Fiona Macleod’s The Sin-Eater.
63 The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales.
64 Sharp’s Wives in Exile was printed by the University Press in Cambridge, and published by Stone and Kimball in 1896 after Kimball purchased Stone’s holdings and moved the firm to New York. It was entered into copyright on June 20, 1896; copies (in boards) were deposited on September 11; and it appeared in the firms List of New Books for November, 1896. Shortly after the book was published, Ignalls Kimball sold the copyright and the unbound sheets to Lamson, Wolffe and Co. of Boston, which issued them with another title page and cover prior to the end of 1896. Publication of the English edition by Grant Richards in London was delayed until 1898.
65 For the Watt’s article, see Endnote 60, Chapter 13 (Volume 2). Sharp sent for possible publication in The Chap-Book his translation of Charles Van Lerberghe’s “dramalet” which was to appear in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Autumn, 61–71. Van Lerberghe (1861–1907) was a Belgian poet whose works include Pan (1906); Entrevisions (1898); and La Chanson d’Ève (1904).
66 Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was a Belgian essayist and dramatist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1911. The Massacre of the Innocents was his first and only published prose essay (1886). He was best known for his symbolist dramas, among them “La Princesse Maliene (1889), “Pelleas et Melisande” (1892), and “Moons Vanna” (1902).
67 “Laclosely Belgique” was the first name of the literary movement with which Maeterlinck was affiliated. Subsequently, the movement was renamed “Le Coq Rouge.”
68 Sharp’s mother and sisters and Elizabeth’s mother were staying with them in Tigh-Na-Bruaich.
69 Patrick Geddes had asked Sharp to review the “Prefatory Note” he had written for The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Autumn, which would be published in mid-October. It may be that Sharp was responsible for the concluding sentences of that short note:
“Yet if man be one with Nature, her evolution is also his and this not only through the ages and the generations, but through the year and its Seasons. Here then are some of the ideas of ‘The Evergreen.’ It makes no promise of perpetual life, but seeks only to link the Autumn of our own age with an approaching Spring, and pass, through Decadence, towards a Renascence.”
Geddes and Sharp shared the hope of renewal, but the personification of Nature and the cadence are Sharpian. Sharp served for a time as Literary Editor of Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, but his status was changed to Colleague, perhaps in August after his health prevented him from delivering the promised lectures in Geddes’s Summer School. In Sharp’s letter To Edmund Clarence Stedman, September 27, 1895 (Volume 2), Sharp asserted that he was the “chief literary partner” of the firm.
70 In his letter To Edmund Clarence Stedman, September 27, 1895 (Volume 2), Sharp told Stedman that he, Mrs. Sharp, and her mother were leaving the Kyles of Bute for Edinburgh that day. In this letter to Gilchrist, he tells Gilchrist they will leave “tomorrow.” That establishes the letter’s date as September 26.
71 Gilchrist must have worried that Sharp’s failure to visit him on his way north, and the lack of correspondence from Sharp in the meantime, portended a breach in their friendship.
72 The three figures in the sketch entitled “Summersleep” are Sharp, Gilchrist, and Gilchrist’s house mate/companion/lover George Garfitt. The latter two visited Sharp at Phenice Croft in July 1893. Near the end of “Summersleep,” the shadow of Gilchrist says “in his heart”: “There is something of awe, of terror, about that house; nay, the whole land here is under a tragic gloom. I should die here, stifled. I am glad I go on the morrow.” The shadow of William Sharp then says “in his heart: “It may be that the gate of hell is hidden there among the grass, or beneath the foundations of my house. Would God I were free! Oh my God, madness and death!” At Phenice Croft, Sharp had invented the persona of Fiona Macleod, and, according to E. A. S., “His imagination was in a perpetual ferment” (Memoir, p. 221). He was engaged there with psychic experiments, possibly drug induced. It was at Phenice Croft in 1893–1894 that he began to feel the presence of a second female personality, which led at times to a troublesome psychic splitting that that seemed to threaten his mental stability. Of this phenomenon, E. A. S. said, “During those two years at Phenice Croft, to which he always looked back with deep thankfulness, he was the dreamer — he was testing his new powers, living his new life, and delighting in the opportunity for psychic experimentation. And for such experimentation the place seemed to him peculiarly suited. To me it seemed ‘uncanny,’ and to have a haunted atmosphere — created unquestionably by him — that I found difficult to live in, unless the sun was shining. This uncanny effect was felt by more than one friend; by Mr. Murray Gilchrist, for instance, whose impressions were described by his host in one of the short ‘Tragic Landscapes’” (Memoir, p. 223).
73 Sharp turned forty on 12 September 1895.
74 The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales.
75 “Les Flaireurs.”
76 This sentence was taken from a letter Sharp sent to Catherine Janvier in the autumn of 1895.
77 In his 26 September letter to Gilchrist, Sharp said he would be back in his London residence on Tuesday, 1 October.
78 Ecce Puella was published on November 1, 1895. See Sharp’s letter To Edward Clodd, November 2, 1895 (Volume 2). Those dates and the dates of Sharp’s trip to Scotland establish the date of this letter.
79 Old World Japan: Legends of the Land of the Gods (London: Grant Allen, 1895).
80 Originally scheduled for publication on October 15, delays by Stone and Kimball pushed back the publication date of The Sin-Eater and Other Tales to early November.
81 Date from postmark.
82 William Edward Garrett Fisher wrote The Transvaal and the Boers (1896). This letter accompanied the following letter from Garrett Fisher to Richard Garnett:
Savoy Mansions | Strand, W. C. | Oct:26, 1895 Richard Garnett, Esq., LL. D. Dear Sir, Mr. William Sharp has done me the honour to give me the enclosed letter of introduction to you. I am very happy to have this opportunity of forwarding it to you and of saying how much pleasure it would give me to make your acquaintance, and realize the personality that as yet I only know from books. I shall do myself the honour of calling upon you at the British Museum next Wednesday at 3 o’clock, and trust that I may be fortunate enough to find you at home and disengaged. And in the meantime I am, Dear Sir, Your obedient servant | W. E. Garrett Fisher |
83 The Sin-Eater was published in October, 1895. Thus the approximate date.
84 He refers to The Sin-Eater, and Other Tales and asks Gilchrist for a more detailed and thoughtful response to the book. The “one other than myself” who can know must be Edith Rinder.
85 For a discussion of this letter and the need expressed herein, see the “Life” section of this chapter.
86 See note to Sharp letter To Mrs. Grant Allen, July 11, 1895 (Volume 2).
87 “Fragments from the Lost Journal of Piero di Cosimo” appeared first in The Scottish Art Review (June, 1890).
88 Hannibal Ingalls Kimball (1874–1933) began his publishing career in 1893, while an undergraduate at Harvard where, with Herbert Stuart Stone, he founded a company and issued among other works, a bibliography of American first editions and the first copies of The Chap-Book, a literary and artistic magazine designed to publicize books published by their company. In 1894, Kimball and Stone moved the firm to Chicago. In March of 1896, a New York sales office was opened and Kimball moved to New York to take charge. A month later, in April, the firm’s principal financial backer, Melville E. Stone, Sr., Herbert Stone’s father and owner/editor of the Chicago Daily News, insisted the firm release capital through liquidation of investments. Kimball did not wish to comply and offered to buy out Stone’s interest. Stone accepted and soon started his own publishing firm, Herbert S. Stone and Company. Kimball continued to operate Stone and Kimball Company in New York, shortly changing its name to reflect his sole ownership, and published thirty-six additional titles between May 8 1896 and July 3 1897. By October 1897, debts were such that the firm had to be liquidated, and Kimball turned to the printing business. He started Cheltenham Press, wherein he could apply his experimental typographical designs to printed advertising. In addition to designing and printing advertisements, Cheltenham issued privately several pamphlets by Stone and Kimball authors, among them Bliss Carman and Robert Louis Stevenson. Kimball left the printing business in 1917 to become President of the National Thrift Bond Corporation. While working in the investment field, Kimball invented the “baby bond” as an investment mechanism for low income groups. In 1921, he joined the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as first Director of Group Annuities. At the time of his death in 1933, he was a recognized authority on industrial pension plans.
89 The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895) appeared in England as Madge o’ the Pool: The Gipsy Christ and Other Tales (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1897).
90 This is the “formal receipt” mentioned in Fiona’s letter To [Hannibal Ingalls Kimball], November 25, 1895 (Volume 2), above.
91 The letter to a publisher, of which this note is a continuation, has not surfaced.
92 Sir George Brisbane Douglas (1856–1935) was described by E. A. S. (Memoir, pp. 253–54) as a “poet, scholar, and keen critic” who “had followed the literary career of William Sharp with careful interest, and gave the same heed to the writings of ‘Fiona Macleod.’” After reading The Sin-Eater, Douglas concluded on the basis of internal evidence that Fiona Macleod was William Sharp and wrote to tell him his conclusion. Douglas edited for the Canterbury Poet series, of which Sharp was the general editor, Poems of the Scottish Minor Poets, from the Age of Ramsay to David Gray (London: Walter Scott, 1891), Contemporary Scottish Verse (London: Walter Scott, 1893), and Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales (London: Walter Scott, 1901). A series of lectures he gave at Glasgow University was published as Scottish Poetry; Drummond of Hawthornden to Fergusson (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1911).
93 The eight preceding lines in the manuscript have been heavily crossed through. The fourth line contains the name Edith Rinder, but the other words are impossible to make out. Presumably, Sharp decided to tell Douglas the role Edith Rinder played in the genesis of Fiona Macleod and then thought better of it. Sharp’s characterization here of Fiona Macleod as a “puzzling literary entity” is an apt description of what she was for Sharp during his lifetime and for Elizabeth as long as she lived. There were many efforts to explain that puzzle while Sharp was alive, and there have been many more in the century following his death in 1905.
94 See Sharp’s letter To Richard Garnett, October 25, 1895 (Volume 2).
95 The reference is to Fiona Macleod’s “Mary of the Gael,” which appeared in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Autumn in the fall of 1895. See Endnote 40, above. Douglas would have seen it in the autumn Evergreen because his tale, “Cobweb Hall”, also appeared in that volume.
96 Fiona Macleod, “From the Hebrid Isles,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 92 (December, 1895), 45–60.
97 See Memoir, pp. 245–46.
98 E. A. S. (Memoir, pp. 253–54) printed Douglas’s response to this letter from Sharp, in which he maintained the fiction of Fiona Macleod’s separate identity. It reads, in part, “I am very glad to find that you think I have understood Miss Macleod’s work, and I think it very good of her to have taken my out-spoken criticisms in such good part. Certainly if she thinks I can be of any use to her in reading over the proofs of ‘The Washer of the Ford,’ it will be a great pleasure to me.”
99 John Lane, the publisher.
101 The firm was having managerial and financial problems. See Endnote 88.
102 As in his letter To Robert Murray Gilchrist, November 1, 1895 (Volume 2), Sharp confided in Gilchrist regarding his depression and asked for help. The two struggling souls are Sharp’s and Edith Rinder’s, or Sharp’s and Fiona Macleod’s, or both, in the sense that Sharp identified Fiona with Edith.
103 John S. Stuart-Glennie was the son of the daughter of John Stuart of Inchbreck FRSE, Professor of Greek in the University of Aberdeen; his father was Alexander Glennie of Maybank Aberdeen. He was educated in law at the University of Aberdeen and became a barrister, called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1853. He later undertook a series of journeys of historical exploration across Europe and Asia to collect folklore. This letter concerns a book — probably of folklore — by Stuart-Glennie. To my knowledge, it was not issued by the Geddes firm.
104 Alexander Carmichael’s “The Land of Lorne and the Satirists of Taynuilt” appeared in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Spring (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 1895), 110–15.
105 This brief note accompanied a copy of the above letter to Stuart Glennie, dated December 26, 1895.
106 As it turned out, Sharp accompanied his wife as far as Paris on January 4 and could not have visited Le Gallienne on Sunday, January 5. See his letter To Richard Le Gallienne, [January 6, 1896] (Volume 2).
107 The Washer of the Ford: Legendary Moralities and Barbaric Tales (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1896) and (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes and Colleagues, 1896). The month of the Edinburgh publication was May, and its arrangement of tales differed from the one here.
108 A second edition of The Mountain Lovers was not published by Lane until February, 1906.
109 “Bliadhue mhath ur duit!” translates as “Happy New Year!”
Chapter 14
1 The Dr. Tebb who collected Arnold’s books must have been W. Scott Tebb, a physician who wrote A Century of Vaccination and What it Teaches (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1898). Sharp’s Canterbury Poets edition of Matthew Arnold’s poems containing his critical introduction was published by Walter Scott in spring 1896.
2 Richard Garnett (1835–1906) was a scholar, librarian, biographer and poet. He rose to become Keeper of Printed Books in the British Museum in 1890 and served in that position until his retirement in 1899. His literary works include numerous translations from the Greek, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; several books of verse; a book of short stories The Twilight of the Gods (1888); and biographies of Thomas Carlyle, John Milton, and William Blake. His The Age of Dryden was published by Bell in December, 1895.
3 Sharp probably wrote this letter during his brief trip to Edinburgh in January, 1896. He was in Edinburgh from Sunday January 12 to Thursday, January 16. The letter is written on the stationery of Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, and Geddes was at home in Dundee. In addition to copies of the letters from Belgian novelists, Sharp enclosed a typed digest of excerpts from reviews of Fiona Macleod, mainly of The Sin Eater, which the Geddes firm published in November 1895.
4 Eugene Demolder (1850–1919) was the author of La Route d’Emeraude (1899), Roman (1899), L’Agonie d’Albion (1901), and Constantin Meunier (1901). Louis Delattre (b. l870) was the author of Bonne Chère; Bon Remde (1938); and Pain de Mon Blé (1938). For previous mention of Georges Eekhoud by Sharp, see Sharp’s letter To Patrick Geddes, April 29, 1895 (Volume 2). The letters thank Edith Rinder for the copies of her translations of Belgian stories which were published as The Massacre of the Innocents and Other Tales by Stone and Kimball (1895) in their Green Tree Library series.
5 No writings by Eekhoud, Demolder, or Delattre appeared in The Evergreen.
6 Sharp’s brackets.
7 In his January 10 letter to Nellie Allen, Sharp said he would be glad to see more of Mrs. Bird and her husband. Friends of the Allens, the Birds lived in London.
8 Edith Wingate Rinder’s The Shadow of Arvor was published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in the Celtic Library series in the fall of 1896.
9 The bottom of the page is cut off. It may have contained something about the nature of his strain and anxiety.
10 Ernest Percival Rhys (1859–1946) was a literary critic, poet, editor. He and Sharp became close friends when editing publications for the Walter Scott publishing company in the 1880s (Rhys the Camelot Prose Series, and Sharp the Canterbury Poets Series). He is best known for his long editorship of “Everyman’s Library” (1906–1946). In Everyman Remembers (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Limited, 1931), a literary reminiscence of London from the 1880s through the 1920s, he described William Sharp as “a veritable literary chameleon, taking on the colours of the regions and people he visited.” His master stroke of magic, Rhys wrote, was “the discovery of the mysterious ‘Fiona Macleod.’ Sharp kept current an imaginary biography of her, which in some moods he fully believed to be fact, the lines between fact and fantasy being very carelessly drawn, or not drawn at all, in his cosmogony” (Everyman Remembers, p. 79). His Fiddler of Carne was published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues later in 1896. Sharp wanted Stone and Kimball to publish an American edition, which Sharp accepted for the Geddes firm. His other publications include Welsh Ballads (1898), Rhymes for Everyman (1933), and Letters from Limbo (1936).
11 This paragraph and the next are written in red ink.
12 Louise Chandler Moulton.
13 The following annotation signed P. G. (Patrick Geddes) is inserted here: “Yes £75 due to W. S. as manager in two installments before May.” In the lower left-hand corner of the letter appears the following: “1896. | Feb. 1. Pd. £25. | Apr. 11. Pd. £50.”
14 This William Sharp letter, and the Fiona Macleod letter that follows, are among several solicited by John Macleay and published in issues of The Highland News dated February 1 and February 8, 1896. In the previous issue (January 25), Macleay called on fellow Highlanders to follow the lead of Fiona Macleod, to “come forward and give the benefit of their ideas and experiences.” It is to be hoped, he said, that “Miss Macleod is but the first in a movement which shall bring the Highlands into line with the great band of young Irish writers who are at present attracting so much attention in the literary world.” The January 25 issue also contained the first of two articles about Fiona Macleod: “A Highland Novelist.” The second article, in the February 1 issue, praises the Irish writers and calls for Highland writers to try their best to emulate their “wide culture” and “commanding knowledge of the laws of their art.” Although the Highlands “do not show well” in this Celtic revival, he continued, they have “one writer of great worth and greater promise,” and that writer is Fiona Macleod, whose first three books — Pharais, The Mountain Lovers, and The Sin-Eater — are discussed in some detail and lavishly praised. The Sharp and Macleod letters reproduced here appear with others in a section of the February 1 issue called “The Highlands in Literature: A Symposium.” Macleay continued the symposium the following week (February 8) with letters from, among others, Katherine Tynan Hinkson, who wrote, “What can I say except that I am fully in sympathy with your desire to see the Highlands in line with a Celtic revival, and to wish you God-speed in your endeavors to promote it? You have begun well with Miss Fiona Macleod. She is worth many lesser and less Celtic writers.”
15 E. A. S. asserts (Memoir, p. 260) that this letter was written in mid-February, but the two articles on Fiona Macleod by John Macleay which Sharp says The Highland News “is printing” appeared in the issues of January 25 and February 1. That suggests a late January date for the letter, which is confirmed by the fact that the Academy review Sharp mentions — a favorable review of The Sin-Eater by Ernest Rhys which appeared “last week” — was in the issue number 1238, dated January 25, 1896 (72 –73).
16 Ecce Puella: And Other Prose Imaginings was published (London: Elkin Mathews) in November 1895, though its title page carried the date 1896. Gilchrist knew Sharp was the author of the Fiona Macleod writings.
17 The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales (Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895). This book was listed in Stone and Kimball’s Chap-Book of November 1, 1895 as “now ready.” Its British published was delayed until January 1897 when it appeared (by Constable’s) under the title of another of its tales, Madge o’ the Pool.
18 Having received a summary and several chapters of Wives in Exile for review, Herbert Stone accepted it for publication and promised one-hundred pounds on receipt of the manuscript. Sharp continued writing it during February and submitted the final manuscript in mid-March. Sharp counted on receiving that money, but it was not forthcoming.
19 E. A. S. stated that Sharp went north to the Pettycur Inn on February 1. In this letter, he tells Nellie Allen he is writing on a Sunday. February 2 was a Sunday, which dates the letter. E. A. S. (Memoir, p. 260) reproduced diary entries of what he wrote at the Pettycur Inn between February 3 and 10.
20 The Allens are to assume the friend is Fiona Macleod. Although Allen suspected Fiona Macleod was Sharp when he read Pharais, he did not dwell on the matter and accepted her as a real person in accord with what Sharp wanted him to believe. Edith Rinder was probably the friend who joined him at the Pettycur Inn. They stayed there often in these years for its relative privacy and easy access to Edinburgh. Sharp found it conducive to writing as Fiona Macleod.
21 See Endnote 14. Macleay has just sent Sharp copies of the weekly paper — probably the January 25 issue, which contained the first of his two pieces on Fiona Macelod, and the February 1 issue, which contained his second article on Fiona, along with the Sharp and Macleod letters dated January 28. The “Symposium” was continued in the February 8 issue. Uncertainty about the letter’s date derives from uncertainty about whether Macleay sent Sharp all three issues, or only the first two.
22 John Macleay contributed a brief reflective essay called “The Breath of the Snow” to the second volume of The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Autumn (113–17), which appeared in the fall of 1895. The reference here is to Macleay’s second and last contribution to The Evergreen, a story called “Nannack” which appeared in the Summer 1896 issue (129–34). Sharp seems to have been more involved in editing this issue, and there is a marked improvement in the quality of its contents. It contains a poem by Sharp, a poem and a tale signed Fiona Macleod, and a sketch by Edith Wingate Rinder based on a recent work by the Breton writer Anatole La Braz. The latter also appeared in Mrs. Rinder’s collection entitled The Shadow of Arvor, which the Geddes firm published in the fall of 1896.
23 Here, Sharp likely had Edith Rinder on account of her beauty.
24 The manuscript contains a note that the letter was posted on February 7, 1896.
25 Richard Le Gallienne.
26 Sharp sent Allen the February 1 issue which contained the letters from Sharp and Fiona Macleod and Macleay’s second article on Fiona Macleod. A letter from Grant Allen, whose name may have been suggested by Sharp, appeared in the “Symposium” in The Highland News of February 8: “Dear Sir: I have every sympathy with the movement you are trying to inaugurate, but I hardly know how I can personally be of any service to it. I have welcomed and will continue to welcome (so far as opportunity is afforded me) all good work of Celtic writers which comes under my notice. More than this, I fear, I have no means of doing. Yours, very faithfully, Grant Allen.”
27 James Barrie (1860–1937), playwright, biographer, and novelist, wrote Peter Pan (1916). Among his many other works are The Admirable Crichton (1914), Dear Brutus (1922), Farewell, Miss Julie Logan (1932), Quality Street (1934) and The Boy David (1938). Samuel Crockett (1860–1914) was the author of many tales, poems, and novels. Among his publications are The Silver Skull (1898), The Loves of Miss Anne (1904), and Rogues Island (1926).
28 Robert Farquharson Sharp, who worked with Garnett in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and later succeeded Garnett as Keeper, was Elizabeth Sharp’s brother as well as William Sharp’s cousin.
29 Fiona Macleod’s Green Fire: A Romance was published in the fall of 1896 by Archibald Constable Ltd.
30 “Feb 18 ’96” is written in pencil at the top of the letter. We can identify this day as a Tuesday.
31 An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language by Alexander MacBain was published in Glasgow in 1896.
32 Lyra Celtica: An Anthology of Representative Celtic Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Sharp, with an introduction and notes by William Sharp, was published in Edinburgh by the Geddes firm on February 21, 1896.
33 The body of the letter is typed, but the postscript is in Sharp’s hand.
34 An article on Fiona Macleod appeared in the issues of January 25 and February 1. The letters from W. S. and F. M. appeared in the February 1 issue. See Endnote 14.
35 “Introduction,” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. by William Sharp, Canterbury Series (London: Walter Scott, 1896).
36 “Morag of the Glen” was published in The Savoy Magazine in November, 1896, in The Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod, Vol. III, Tragic Romances (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes and Colleagues, 1897); and in the Tauchintz volume The Sunset of Old Tales in 1905. E. A. S. placed it in The Dominion of Dreams volume of the Collected Works.
37 E. A. S.’s friend, Mona Caird, was with her when she left Sienna for Rome. She must have joined Elizabeth in Florence.
38 “The Three Marvels of Hy” appeared in The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes & Colleagues, 1896).
39 The “Prologue” to The Washer of the Ford was written “To Kathia,” who was Catherine Janvier, the American painter and folklorist. She and her husband, Thomas Janvier, a popular fiction writer, lived during the winter months in Provence and in Greenwich Village in NYC the rest of the year. They were very close friends with the Sharps.
40 In his letter To Elizabeth A. Sharp, February 21, 1896 (Volume 2), Sharp said he hoped to finish “Morag of the Glen” that night. In F. M.’s letter To the Editor, Blackwood’s Magazine, March 21, 1896 (Volume 2), Sharp asked the editor to make a decision about the story. Thus, this letter was written in late February or early March. Blackwood’s did not accept “Morag of the Glen.” See Endnote 36.
41 Robert McClure was the representative in England of McClure’s Magazine, which was founded in America by his brother, S. S. McClure. In 1895, Stone and Kimball appointed Robert McClure as the firm’s London “buying agent.”
42 In his letter To Edmund Clarence Stedman, January 25, 1897 (Volume 2), Sharp described Lillian Rea as “an American girl who after much residence abroad and fairly wide experience came to London first to assist me secretarially, and afterwards succeeded to a responsible position in the firm of Patrick Geddes & Colleagues.” By that date, Miss Rea had left the Geddes firm and settled in London as a literary agent. Sharp was responsible for having her hired by the Geddes firm, and he continued to think of her as his assistant. He was annoyed with Geddes for delaying her departure to assist him in London. He needed secretarial help, and he needed her as a companion. His doctor had ordered he not be left alone which suggests a companion helped him ward off the demons of depression. Of the two women who usually performed that function, Elizabeth was in Italy, and Edith Rinder was ill.
43 E. A. S. edited the anthology Lyra Celtica, which was published by the Geddes firm on February 21. Her regular work was writing art reviews for the Glasgow Herald.
44 L/C is Lyra Celtica; Rhys is Ernest Rhys’s The Fiddler of Carne.
45 His sister, Mary Sharp.
46 Date from postmark.
47 Irving Bacheller (1859–1950), a popular American novelist, established in 1884 the Bacheller Newspaper Syndicate, which supplied fiction and feature stories to major newspapers and periodicals. Bacheller’s syndicate introduced the American reading public to Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. More than 3.5 million copies of his own novels were sold during his lifetime.
48 By which, Sharp likely meant restoring/renewing his health.
49 In his letter To Herbert Stuart Stone, March 11, 1896 (Volume 1), Sharp proposed an article on Le Gallienne for Stone and Kimball’s Chap-Book, but the proposal was not accepted. Le Gallienne’s Prose Fancies was published by Stone and Kimball on June 25, 1896 and concurrently in London by John Lane. It was advertised in the June 15 issue of The Chap-Book.
50 The first two sentences of the Prologue read as follows: “To you, in your far — away home in Provence, I send these tales out of the remote North you love so well, and so well understand. The same blood is in our veins, a deep current somewhere beneath the tide that sustains us.”
51 Mrs. Janvier continued: “I refer to this because a little later Mr. Sharp gave me the original draft of this Prologue, written partly with pen and partly with pencil. For the student of Fiona Macleod, it is instructive to compare draft and printed page; to note the precise choice of word, the careful ordering of phrase and placing of paragraph. This same painstaking precision is shown in some other manuscripts and corrected proof in my possession. Never was there a more careful writer than Fiona Macleod, while of her creator this cannot be said.” Shortly after the bound “Prologue” reached the Janviers on May 1, Sharp himself arrived, en route to the Riviera.
52 The Washer of the Ford was published by the Geddes firm on May 12 and by Stone and Kimball on June 12, 1896.
53 This transcription is from Sharp’s draft for Mary to copy into the F. M. hand. James Ashcroft Noble (1844–1896) was a well-known critic and editor. See Sharp’s letter To James Ashcroft Noble, November 11, 1885 (Volume 1).
54 The remaining text from here to the end of the paragraph is crossed out in the manuscript.
55 The text from this point to “you and your daughters” is crossed out on the manuscript.
56 Good Friday was April 3 in 1896.
57 John Ross was hired by Geddes to manage the finances of the publishing company. Several letters in the Geddes Collection (NLS) provide context for this letter. An April 4 letter from Ross to Sharp precipitated this letter from Sharp to Geddes. On April 10, Geddes assured Sharp he would receive a check and wrote a short note to Elizabeth (to be forwarded to her in Italy by Lillian Rea) assuring her that Sharp’s financial concerns would soon be alleviated. Lillian Rea returned that note to Geddes, stating that Sharp wished to keep knowledge of his ill health and concern over money matters from his wife.
58 Town and Gown Association, Ltd. was a stock-holding company formed in May, 1896, by Martin White, a long-time friend of P. G. Geddes, to place the various enterprises of Geddes on a strictly business basis. The association would support projects for civic betterment and provide a common meeting ground for men of affairs and men of learning so they might work together on such projects as the eradication of slum areas in the cities and the elimination of specializations in the universities.
59 Thomas Barclay. See Endnote 39, Chapter 23 (Volume 2).
60 Wives in Exile was published in London by Grant Richards in 1898.
61 Stone must have told Sharp to go ahead with an article on Le Gallienne, but Sharp seems not to have produced it.
62 Le Gallienne’s The Quest of the Golden Girl was published by John Lane in the fall of 1896 in London and New York.
63 The surviving fragment begins here. Its handwriting is probably that of Lillian Rea who was serving as Sharp’s secretary. Its signature and postscript are in Sharp’s handwriting.
64 John Stuart Glennie who was the author of Arthurian Localities: Their Historical Origin, Chief Country, and Fengalian Relations (1869), King Arthur: Or, the Drama of the Revolution (1867–1870), Christ and Osiris (1876), Merlin (1899), and Sociological Studies (1906). He seems not to have published a book from the Geddes firm.
65 “Introductory Note,” The Poems of Ossian, trans. by James Macpherson (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes and Colleagues, 1896).
66 Edith Wingate-Rinder contributed “Telen Rumengal” to The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Summer (1896, pp. 90–97) and “Sant Efflamm and King Arthur,” to The Book of Winter (1896–1897, p. 69). Nora Hopper’s “Swan White” appeared in The Book of Summer (41–42), and her “All Soul’s Day” in The Book of Winter (75).
67 George Eyre-Todd’s “Night in Arran” appeared in The Book of Summer (137–41).
68 Date from postmark. Sharp joined his wife in Venice on May 16, and they returned to England via the Italian Lakes. Sharp told Geddes in his letter of 9 April that it would be at least a week or ten days after he left Paris before he would meet his wife “as I am told [presumably by his doctor] to go by the Riviera, & stay somewhere 3 or 4 days on the way, at least — This for the head.” That seems strangely specific advice from a physician and makes one wonder if Sharp wanted an interlude with his friends Thomas and Catherine Janvier in Provence. They may have accompanied him when he went on to Monte Carlo on the Riviera where he made more money in one night than he received from any of the books over which he had been laboring. The problems alluded to in this letter were probably the break-up of Stone and Kimball. Janvier would have had the latest U.S. publishing gossip, and Sharp was very concerned about whether Kimball, having established a successor firm in New York, could save Stone and Kimball’s publishing list and continue to market his books. Sharp may have been trying to interest the firm in the American publication of one of Gilchrist’s books.
69 The publication date of The Washer of the Ford (May 12, 1896) approximately dates this letter.
70 William Maxse Meredith, a son of George Meredith, had recently become an editor at Archibald Constable and Co. Perhaps on the strength of his father’s enthusiasm for Fiona Macleod, he had agreed to publish a Fiona Macleod novel. Her Green Fire: A Romance was published by Constable in November, 1896. It was not well received, and Sharp decreed that only one section of it, “The Herdsman,” be preserved in the Fiona Macleod canon.
71 Date from postmark. As always, Sharp was eager to have Gilchrist’s opinion of his work.
72 Mrs. Gilchrist was Murray’s mother.
73 Sharp is responding to someone who asked him about “The Three Miracles of Hy,” which he wrote in February 1896 (see letter to To Elizabeth A. Sharp, February 21, 1896 (Volume 2)), and included in Fiona Macleod’s Washer of the Ford which was published in May. Thus the approximate date of the letter.
74 The American edition of The Washer of the Ford was finally published by Stone and Kimball on June 12, 1896 in New York. Having first opened a sales office for Stone and Kimball in New York, Kimball bought out Stone in early April, 1896, moved the firm to New York, and continued to publish for a while under the name Stone and Kimball, and then just Kimball. Herbert Stone retained The Chap-Book and started the H. S. Stone Publishing Company in Chicago. Later in 1896, when Kimball had to dissolve his firm, the Washer of the Ford sheets were acquired by Lamson, Wolffe and Co. in Boston. The delays in publication dates and payments which so annoyed and inconvenienced Sharp, who needed the money, were caused by the firm’s financial difficulties and Stone’s gradual loss of interest in its fate.
75 Sharp finally learned from Kimball the reason for the delays he had been experiencing. Melville Stone, Herbert’s father, decided he could no longer cover the losses of the publishing firm whereupon Ingalls Kimball’s father provided funds for his son to purchase Herbert Stone’s share of the firm and move it to New York.
76 Wives in Exile, A Comedy in Romance was entered for copyright on June 20, 1896 by Stone and Kimball, New York, and copies were deposited on September 11. Shortly after its publication date, Kimball sold the remaining sheets to Lamson, Wolffe and Co. of Boston which reissued them with its imprint and a different cover. Herbert Stone had promised Sharp one-hundred pounds upon receipt of his manuscript, but Kimball was unable or unwilling to fulfill that promise. The first English edition was published by Grant Richards, in June 1898.
77 Since this letter was written on a Sunday, and since Sharp tells Garnett he spent a few days in Dover and reached London a week later than his wife, he must have returned to London on June 11 and written this letter to Garnett on June 14, a Sunday.
78 Dante, Petrarch, and Camoens: CXXIV Sonnets (London: John Lane, 1896).
79 Luis de Camoëns (also Camoës) (1524–1580) was a Portuguese poet and adventurer of Galician descent. During an eventful life which included losing an eye while fighting the Moors and being shipwrecked off the coast of China, he wrote lyric poetry, sonnets, and drama. He is most remembered as the author of the The Lusiads, an epic poem that was widely read in nineteenth-century Britain after it was translated by Sir Richard Burton.
80 In his note to Gilchrist from Belagio, Sharp said he and his wife would return to England on 4 June, with Elizabeth going directly to London and William following a few days later. In the June 14 letter to Garnett he said he had spent a week in Dover on the way to London, which means that he arrived there on Thursday, June 11. In this letter, Elizabeth tells Geddes she called a doctor to see to her husband upon his return. That would probably have been during the week of June 14. Since she is forwarding Geddes’s note to Fiona to the Pettycur Inn, Sharp must have left London for Edinburgh shortly before E. A. S. wrote to Geddes. We know Sharp stayed at the Pettycur Inn from about June 20 until June 30. The probable date of this letter is, therefore, June 20, a Saturday.
81 Elizabeth had taken over from her husband the job of writing of art reviews for the Glasgow Herald.
82 Arthur Allhallow Geddes was born on Allhallows Day in the fall of 1895; the Sharps were his godparents.
83 The Pettycur Inn, which is where Sharp was headed, was across the Forth from Edinburgh. Although Elizabeth asked Geddes in this letter not to discuss business matters with her husband “for any length of time at any one sitting” since he is so weak, subsequent letters indicate he was significantly involved with publishing firm business while he was there.
84 This letter was typed by Lillian Rea on Patrick Geddes and Colleagues stationery. “WILLIAM SHARP. per L. H. R.” is also typed. Sharp did not sign the letter. Geddes was teaching in Dundee.
85 James Campbell Irons’s Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll was published privately in 1896.
86 June 30 was a Tuesday, which means Sharp left Edinburgh for London on July 2 or 3. The first two typed pages are on blank sheets, and Copy is written at the top of page one. The last three pages are typed on Geddes and Colleagues stationery. Again, Sharp’s signature is typed, and below it L. H. R. is written in Lillian Rea’s hand.
87 Catherine Janvier’s anthropological essay, “A Devolution of Terror” appeared in the fourth and final volume of The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter, 106–11.
88 To my knowledge, none of these works by Thomson materialized.
89 Marion Isabel Newbigin (1869–1934) was a biologist, geographer, and editor of the Scottish Geographical Magazine from 1902 to 1934. She has been called one of the founders of modern British Geography. Her works include Life by the Sea Shore (1901), Animal Geography (1913), and Geographical Aspects of Balkan Problems (1915).
90 Sharp’s critical biographies of Heinrich Heine (1888) and Robert Browning (1890) were published in the Walter Scott firm’s Great Writer’s Series.
91 This project never materialized.
Chapter 15
1 On this passage, E. A. S. wrote the following: “During the writing of Pharais the author began to realize how much the feminine element dominated in the book, that it grew out of the subjective or feminine side of his nature. He, therefore, decided to issue the book under the name of Fiona Macleod, that ‘flashed ready-made’ into his mind” (Memoir, p. 227).
2 Date from postmark.
3 Eugene Lee Hamilton sent this letter to Louise Chandler Moulton with the following note:
Prince of Wales Hotel | DeVere Gardens, W. | July 17 | Dear Mrs. Moulton | Our friend William Sharp has given me this note of introduction for you, in case you should not remember that I was once introduced to you at Florence in the days when I was still an invalid. Would you let me call on you? And in that case would you tell me when I should be likely to find you at home. | very truly yours | Eugene Lee Hamilton
4 This statement dates the letter as Sunday, July 19, 1896.
5 The fourth and last number of The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter (published 1896–1897) contains no contributions from Macleay. This letter was written sometime during the week of July 27 when the Sharps were staying in Bamborough before proceeding on August 1 to spend a fortnight on “the little Holy Isle off the Eastern Shores, Lindisfarne, Iona’s daughter” and do some “sea bathing” (Memoir, p. 266).
6 Neil Munro (1863–1930) was a Scottish journalist, newspaper editor, author and literary critic. He worked as a journalist on the Greenock Advertiser, the Glasgow News, the Falkirk Herald and the Glasgow Evening News, and he became editor of the Glasgow Evening News in 1918. A key figure in Scottish literary circles, he was a friend of many writers and an early promoter of the works of Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. Efforts to identify Dr. Robertson Nieal have been unsuccessful.
7 Green Fire: A Romance was published by Archibald Constable and Co. in London, and Harpers & Brothers in New York in November 1896.
8 In a letter dated March 21, 1896, F. M. offered the editor of Blackwood’s the British serial rights for her story “Morag of the Glen.” The Washer of the Ford was published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in Edinburgh in May, 1896, and by Stone and Kimball in New York on 12 June 1896.
9 Date from postmark.
10 Kernahan must have made a proposal through Sharp to prepare an edition of a writer’s work, perhaps an edition of poetry in the Canterbury Series, for which Sharp was a general editor.
11 With no more than a brief stop in Edinburgh, the Sharps went from Lindisfarne to Dunoon on the western shore of the upper Firth of Clyde west of Glasgow. In Edinburgh, Sharp found a letter from Macleay saying he had begun to arrange for Sharp to give a lecture on “The Celtic Spirit,” which Sharp mentioned in his letter To John Macleay [July 28?, 1896] (Volume 2) as a possibility for early October in Inverness. After the debacle of his first lecture at Geddes’s Edinburgh Summer School in August 1895, Sharp was afraid to commit himself to giving a lecture, much as he wanted to be a public spokesman for the Scottish Celtic cause. The letter was probably written in Edinburgh at the office of Patrick Geddes and Colleagues.
12 “1896” is written in pencil at the top right of the first page. Having welcomed Macleay’s praise for the Fiona Macleod writings and his support for the cause of Scottish Celticism, Sharp reacted with alarm when the August 15 issue of The Highland News reached him in Dunoon. It contained Macleay’s article entitled “Mystery! Mystery! All in a Celtic Haze,” which quoted speculation by others about the true identity of Fiona Macleod. In this letter, Sharp reacts angrily to counter the speculation and chastises Macleay for repeating slanders against the poor defenseless woman. In succeeding letters to Macleay during the week, it began to occur to Sharp that the publicity generated by Macleay might well improve sales of the Fiona books.
13 At the close of Sharp’s letter To John Macleay [July 28?, 1896] (Volume 2), he gave Macleay permission to reprint a statement he had made to the Glasgow Evening News: “Miss Fiona Macleod is not Mr. William Sharp; Miss Fiona Macleod is not Mrs. William Sharp; and […] Miss Fiona Macleod is — Miss Fiona Macleod.”
14 Sharp’s letter of “Tuesday night,” August 18, must have been enclosed with this letter written on “Wednesday forenoon.”
15 The Sharps returned briefly to Edinburgh on Saturday August 22.
16 After receiving Sharp’s August 19 letter, Macleay must have responded with apologies for his actions. Since the Sharps went to Edinburgh on Saturday, August 22, this letter was written on Friday, August 21.
17 In his August 19 letter, Sharp said he expected to be in Inverness on September 4 or 5.
18 Sharp told Macleay on Friday August 21 he had forwarded his letter of apology to F. M. Here he has Fiona acknowledge receipt of Macleay’s letter. Sharp probably dictated this letter or gave a draft to Mary for transcription when he reached Edinburgh on August 22.
19 Elizabeth, William, and Mary Sharp left Edinburgh for the Kyles of Bute on Monday, August 24.
20 From the Hills of Dream: Mountain Songs and Island Runes was published in Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in November, 1896.
21 Henry Chandler Bowen (1813–1896) was the founder and an occasional editor of the New York Independent.
22 In the Memoir (pp. 266–68), E. A. S. printed this fragment, which she said was sent from the Tighnabruaich Hotel, after those dated 9/23 and 9/26. The Sharps and his sister Mary went to Tignabruaich in the Kyles of Bute on August 24 to join his mother and his other sisters. In mid-September, E. A. S. returned to London “to recommence [her] work on The Glasgow Herald” (Memoir, p. 266). This letter was written after she left and before Sharp and Mary left to stay near the Rinders in Tarbert. The next two fragments of letters to EAS, which she published in the Memoir (pp. 266–67) and dated September 23 and 26, were written at Tarbert. The letters to Yeats, Gilchrist, and Stedman that follow have Strath-Na-Mara, Tarbert of Loch Fynne, Argyll as their return address.
23 “The Awakening of Angus Ogue” appeared in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter, 118–23.
24 “The Rune of the Passion of Women” first appeared in Fiona Macleod’s From the Hills of Dream. Arthur Symons, editor of The Savoy, accepted not “The Archer” but a second story Sharp submitted, “Morag of the Glen,” which appeared in The Savoy, 7 (November, 1896), 227–48. “The Archer” appeared first in The Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod, Vol. III, Tragic Romances (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes & Colleagues, 1897). “Ahez the Pale” appeared in Vol. II of The Shorter Stories: Barbaric Tales, also 1897. “The Lily Leven” was a book Sharp intended to publish under the feminine pseudonym, but was never finished. A Fiona Macleod letter To William Meredith, October 17, 1896 (Volume 2) indicates Sharp intended to send the book to him for publication by Constables.
25 Mona Caird, Edith Wingate Rinder.
26 This letter is unique in that two manuscript copies survive. The draft in Sharp’s hand is in the National Library of Scotland, and Mary Sharp’s copy in the Fiona Macleod handwriting is in the Yale Library. Sharp and Mary were staying in a hotel in Tarbert. Mary’s copy in the Fiona Macleod hand, which was sent to Yeats, contains a few revisions in Sharp’s hand. One is of special interest. He has Fiona tell Yeats her soon to be published volume of poetry will be called From the Hills of Dream. In the draft, Sharp first wrote “our” when referring to the volume, and then crossed out the “our” and wrote “my [Fiona’s] own book of verse”. Mary copied “my own book of verse,” but in the manuscript there is a carat after “my,” and “(our)” is written above the line in Sharp’s hand and then lightly crossed through. Sharp was trying to decide whether or not to signal to Yeats that he shared responsibility for the poems in the Fiona volume. He remained conflicted in his dealings with Yeats in the matter of Fiona Macleod. Yeats was interested in the writings of Fiona Macleod, not those of William Sharp. Sharp wanted Yeats to accept him as a colleague in the Celtic Revival, but that desire was frustrated as long as he could not take credit for the writings he was contributing to the movement. The complex relationship between Sharp and Yeats is a fascinating story I have recounted partially in numbers 13 and 14 of the Yeats Annual (edited by Warwick Gould, 1998 (Macmillan Press) and 2001 (Palgrave)). For comments on the circumstances and significance of the visions mentioned in the letter, see my “W. B. Yeats and William Sharp: The Archer Vision,” English Language Notes, 6/4 (1969), 273–80.
27 The reference here is to Sharp, her “dear friend and confrere.” In the next paragraph, the friend has been with her during “much sailing about and faring in remote places,” and he has participated in the “work we are doing, and putting together the volume of verse.” Sharp wanted Yeats to believe not only that he figured somehow in the writings of Fiona Macleod, but also that the two were traveling companions.
28 From the Hills of Dream.
29 In his recent letter to Fiona, Yeats commented on her The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities which had been published by the Geddes firm in May, 1896. “Annir Choille,” mentioned in the next paragraph, is one of the stories in that volume.
30 This poem was first published in The Savoy, 5 (September, 1896), 52. When it next appeared in April, 1897 (The Secret Rose (London: Laurence and Bullen, Ltd.), pp. ix–x), it became “To the Secret Rose,” and contained one revision in accord with the advice Sharp offers in this paragraph: “heavy” in line 7 became not “slumbrous,” but “great.”
31 Yeats’s Blake paper — “William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy” — was published in three parts in the July, August, and September issues of The Savoy. A reproduction of a Blake illustration of The Divine Comedy which accompanied the essay caused Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son to ban the magazine from newsstands. See Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927), p. 50.
32 John Sherman and Dhoya (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891).
33 The Celtic Twilight, Men and Women, Dhouls and Faeries (London: Laurence and Bullen, 1893).
34 The promised volume was Yeats’s next volume of poems, The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Matthews, 1899).
36 In transcribing this letter (Memoir, pp. 270–72), E. A. S. read this word as “bare.” In Mary’s final copy it is clearly “wan,” but it could easily be read as “bare” in Sharp’s draft. E. A. S must have transcribed the letter from the draft, even though Yeats loaned her his letters from Sharp for the Memoir.
37 The Rinders probably rented the house in Tarbert for the month of September. On Saturday September 26, Sharp wrote to E. A. S from Tarbert. Thus he left for Glasgow on Friday, October 2 and spent that night in Glasgow before going on to Edinburgh the next day. That dates this letter as about September 28 and the following letter to Stedman (“In a day or two now I leave the West Highlands.”) as about September 30.
38 “Edmund-mo-ghraidh” translates as “Edmund, my friend”; and “Stedman mo-caraid” translates as “Stedman, my dear one.”
39 Sharp adopted a masculine, comradely and slightly risqué persona in writing to Stedman. It reflected what he perceived to be the prevailing pagan spirit, derived from the powerful influence of Whitman, among the literary men he knew in the United States. Several letters suggest they shared confidences about their free-spirited extra-marital affairs, real or imagined, when they were together.
40 Edith Wingate Rinder’s The Shadow of Arvor was published by the Geddes firm in the fall of 1896.
41 Mrs. Clothilde Balfour’s essay “The Black Month,” appeared in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter, 132–37.
42 J. H. Pearce’s story “Fantasies” appeared in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Winter, 35–42.
43 William Cuthbertson, who contributed the poem “Grierson of Lag” to The Evergreen’s winter volume, had a supervisory position in the Geddes firm.
44 This letter is in Lillian Rea’s handwriting and is signed by William Sharp.
45 William Meredith (1865–1937) was George Meredith’s son. He was a director and partner at Archibald Constable Publishing Company and was responsible for issuing reprints of his father’s books as well as for the posthumous publishing of works left unfinished by Meredith at his death. He also edited The Letters of George Meredith.
46 This book was never finished. After publishing Fiona Macleod’s Green Fire in November 1896, Archibald Constable and Co. next published her The Laughter of Peterkin: A Retelling of Old Tales of the Celtic Wonderland in October, 1897. The Laughter of Peterkin contains retellings of Celtic tales with the following titles: “Prologue: The Laughter of Peterkin,” “The Four White Swans,” “The Gate of the Sons of Turenn,” and “Darthool and the Sons of Usna.” Since Fiona Macleod in the above letter refers to a “Chapter” of “The Lily Leven,” this work was probably the proposed novel and not one of the tales published as The Laughter of Peterkin.
47 Sharp went to Southhampton on October 22, and sailed from there on October 23.
48 I have been unable to identify this individual.
49 Date from postmark. Sharp inadvertently wrote “October 3” for “October 30” as his arrival date.
50 Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper’s Magazine.
51 Immediately preceding this fragment in the Memoir (p. 222), E. A. S. described the effect upon her husband’s work of his friendship with Edith Wingate Rinder: “And though this newer phase of his work was at no time the result of collaboration, as certain of his critics have suggested, he was deeply conscious of his indebtedness to this friend, for as he stated to me in a letter of instructions, written before he went to America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death — he realised that it was ‘to her, etc.’” Following that fragment from his letter of instructions, E. A. S. went on to say why Edith Rinder had such a profound effect on her husband.
52 In a letter of October 14, Sharp told Arthur Stedman his departure date would be October 23.
53 Louise Chandler Moulton.
54 Writing from Henry Alden’s home in Metuchen where he stayed upon his arrival in New York on October 30, Sharp described the frenzied lead-up to the 1896 presidential election on Tuesday, November 3, in which William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan. The huge parade in New York occurred on Saturday, October 31, which was Halloween.
55 Fiona Macleod’s Green Fire was published while Sharp was in New York, and this letter to E. A. S was written from New York (Memoir, p. 275).
56 This letter is pasted into the front of a first edition of From the Hills of Dream. Though undated, “Received Nov 7 / 96” is written at the top of the letter. The letter itself is in the Fiona handwriting.
57 Following this sentence, “C. & D.” appears in Sharp’s or another’s hand. Sharp had asked Carman, who was an editor at Copeland and Day, to enquire about the possibility of that firm publishing an American edition of From the Hills of Dream.
58 Perhaps Fiona Macleod’s Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities which appeared in May 1896.
59 Sharp’s steamer left Hoboken on November 14 (Saturday) which dates this letter November 13 (Friday).
60 Ingalls Kimball sent a “ship reporter” to interview Sharp after he landed in New York to placate him before conducting business. The reporter was John D. Barry who wrote a favorable piece about Sharp in The Daily Tatler, a short -lived literary magazine which was edited by Kimball (also its publisher) and Carolyn Wells. Sidney Kramer, in his History of Stone and Kimball and Herbert S. Stone and Company (Chicago: Norman W. Forgue, 1940), said of the publication: “Kimball was granted time [from bankruptcy] to publish between November 7 and 21, 1896, The Daily Tatler,[…] the only daily paper published for profit in the United States devoted exclusively to literary and artistic topics.” Kramer quoted Carolyn Wells saying the paper did not die of “inanition.” Rather it proved “too great a strain on the time and energies of the staff, who discovered that to rise at six o’clock every morning is a sad grind and without its due reward in fun. So the thirteenth day saw the final edition of what was doubtless the only daily literary paper ever attempted.” In his November 13 letter Sharp expressed his thanks for the notice in The Daily Tatler and his hope that the publication would become more influential (greater shadow) and survive as a daily.
62 Sharp did not publish a story under this title.
63 Sharp’s signature has been cut out of the letter.
64 This sentence was omitted from E. A. S.’s transcription of the letter (Memoir, p. 279), but Ernest Rhys retained it in the excerpt of the letter he included in his Letters from Limbo (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1936).
65 Sharp arranged for Lamson, Wolffe, and Company to take the plates and printed sheets of Wives in Exile from Stone and Kimball in 1896 and issue the volume. See Endnote 68.
66 Two Fiona Macleod books were published while Sharp was in America: Green Fire and From the Hills of Dream. The books intended for the three Americans were probably copies of the latter.
67 In switching to a new sheet of paper, Sharp repeated #4.
68 In his descriptive bibliography of the published books of Stone and Kimball (History of Stone and Kimball and Herbert S. Stone and Company, p. 242), Sidney Kramer described Wives in Exile as published by Stone and Kimball, and gave the following information:
Entered for copyright June 20, 1896; copies (in boards) deposited September 11. Included in A New List of the Books of Stone & Kimball, November 1896. Price $1.25. Copyright assigned shortly after publication to Lamson, Wolffe & Co. of Boston; who issued the same sheets, with cancel title and binding of blue buckram, before the end of the year. English edition not published until July 1898, by Grant Richards.
Having negotiated with Kimball to obtain the rights for the book, Sharp arranged for the transfer of sheets and plates from Kimball to Lamson, Wolffe, and Company and assigned his rights to that firm for the sum of £150. He next tried unsuccessfully to recover from Herbert Stuart Stone the £150 difference between what he received from Lamson and what Stone had originally offered. In New York, he met with Herbert Stone’s father, Melville Stone, who was founder and editor of the Chicago Daily News and a man of considerable means. Melville Stone agreed his son had a moral obligation and suggested the matter go to E. C. Stedman for arbitration. Sharp agreed.
69 This letter to Ross is in Patrick Geddes’s handwriting and signed by William Sharp. It represents Geddes’s effort to enlist Ross’s help in retrieving the £100 Sharp had invested in Geddes’s Town and Gown Association. Geddes added a separate note to Ross which reads, “Dear Ross | The accompanying copy of receipt in addition to the preceding note from W. S. explains itself. | Yours, | Pat Geddes.” With the uncertain outcome of his efforts in the United States to recover the £300, Sharp was desperately seeking money.
70 Messrs. White and Wilson were connected with the Riverside Press of Edinburgh, which printed material for P. G. Geddes and Colleagues.
71 Arshag Chobanian (1872–1954), author of Chants Populaires Arméniens (1903), The People of Armenia (1914), La Femme Arménienne (1918), and La Roseraie d’Arménie (1918).
72 For the final ordering of the contents of The Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod, see Elizabeth Sharp’s bibliography in the second volume of the two-volume edition of her Memoir (pp. 390–92).
Chapter 16
1 Although undated, this card was written when Sharp stopped in Paris on his way to England from the South of France in early January, 1897. The last Fiona Macleod book mentioned, From the Hills of Dream, was published by Geddes in November, 1896. This card pinpoints where Sharp was staying when he stopped in Paris to see Yeats, who is the “important writer” for whom the books are being ordered. Yeats owned copies of all four books, but they were in London. The additional copies were probably intended for Macgregor Mathers, his wife Moina Mathers, or Maud Gonne, friends with whom Yeats was interacting closely during his time in Paris. Yeats described his activities in Paris, including his remarkable interactions with William Sharp, in his Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955, pp. 329–40). I have recounted it in a section called “A Plunge in the Seine” in my article on “W. B. Yeats, William Sharp, and Fiona Macleod: A Celtic Drama, 1897,” in Yeats Annual No. 14, Yeats and the Nineties, ed. Warwick Gould (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 62–109.
2 Although undated, this short letter was written when Sharp passed through London briefly on his way from Paris to the Pettycur Inn in Fife, where he stayed for the rest of the month.
3 This section is written in Sharp’s hand at the top left of the typed first page of the signed letter. Four words following the last word — friend — are crossed out and are illegible, and above them are the initials “FM.” From Paris, Sharp stopped briefly in London, went straight on to Edinburgh, and crossed the Forth to stay at the Pettycur Inn. He arranged for Edith Rinder to meet him there so they could discuss Yeats’s request that Sharp and Fiona Macleod assist him in his psychic search for the rituals of his Celtic Mystical Order. Sharp must have convinced Edith to function as his partner, thus standing in for Fiona Macleod, in this endeavor, which went on for several years.
4 Sharp had led Stedman to believe he was having an extramarital affair with Fiona Macleod. Here he implies that he has been surreptitiously with Fiona and that Stedman had or was having similar rendezvous. This theme recurs in Sharp’s letters to Stedman.
5 The remainder of the letter is hand-written.
6 This reissue of the Fiona Macleod stories in three soft-covered and relatively inexpensive volumes was published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in March, 1897.
7 Neither of these proposed American editions materialized.
8 George Cotterell (?1865–1939), a poet, critic, and good friend of Sharp’s, was the editor of The Yorkshire Herald. His works include The Banquiet: A Political Satire in Verse (1885) and Poems: Old and New (1894). Stedman included two of his poems in his exhaustive Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1895).
9 “Century Club | New York” is crossed through. Evidence for dating this and the previous letter to Gilchrist is the likelihood that Sharp was using stationery he had brought home from New York in November 1896 when he stayed as a guest at the Century Club. The mention in this letter of the possibility of Gilchrist coming to London in March suggests the February date for this and the previous letter to Gilchrist.
10 Sharp’s mid-March letter to Coulson Kernahan indicates that Gilchrist was in London about that time.
11 Born and educated in Scotland, Andrew Lang (1844–1912) took a first in classics at Balliol College, Oxford, held a fellowship there, and went on to become a popular poet, journalist, critic and collector of folk and fairy tales. George Gissing (1857–1903) was a British novelist who wrote, among other works, New Grub Street (1891); The Whirlpool (1897); and The Town Traveler (1901). Austin Dobson, a well-known poet, critic, and biographer, was employed as a civil servant at the Board of Trade from 1856 until 1901. Garnet Joseph Wolseley (1833–1913) was an Irish soldier and historian who wrote Narrative of the War in China (1862); Life of Marlborough (1894); The Decline and Fall of Napoleon (1895); and The Story of a Soldier’s Life (1903).
12 E. C. Stedman described the Stoddard dinner in two letters to Sharp, portions of which Elizabeth Sharp included in the Memoir (pp. 272–73). The first of these is dated February 17: “The most important social matter here this winter relating to our Guild will be a large important dinner to be given on March 25th by the Author’s Club and his other friends, to Richard Henry Stoddard. We are going to try to make an exception to the rule that New York is not good to her own, and to render a tribute somewhat commensurate with Stoddard’s lifelong services, and his quality as poet and man… . Of course I do not expect that you will come over here, and I am quite sure you will write a letter which can be read at the dinner, for I have in mind your personal friendship with Stoddard and affectionate comprehension of his genius and career.” The second, dated April 13, describes the occasion: “Your letter to the Stoddard Banquet was by far the best and most inclusive of the various ones received, and it was read out to the 150 diners and met with high favour… . It proved to be the most notable literary occasion yet known in this city — was brilliant, magnetic, enthusiastic throughout. I felt a pride in my office as Chairman. The Stoddards were deeply gratified by your letter.”
13 The letter from Patrick Geddes jointly to William Cuthbertson and William Sharp made the points Sharp took up in this letter. Born in Constantinople, Arshag Tchobanian (1872–1954) was a teacher and writer who contributed poems, fairy tales, literary studies and criticisms to various periodicals. In 1895, he fled the Turks and settled in Paris, where he devoted himself to making the Armenians better known in Europe. He published a number of volumes containing French translations of Armenian literature, ancient and modern, and founded and edited Anahit, a literary and critical magazine.
14 The exuberance and specificity of this paragraph suggest Sharp had enjoyed a few days with Edith Rinder after not having been with her for three weeks and three days. The intimacy of their relationship is suggested by asserting the privacy of the postscript and asking that the letter be destroyed. Since he had been with Fiona/Edith just three days ago “by the sea,” they may have been, as on other occasions, in the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel near Dover. Sharp repeatedly confided in Stedman about his relationship with Edith disguised as Fiona. He also conflated Fiona and Edith in his dealings with Yeats and others. The two women — one real and the other imagined — were inextricably bound in his own mind, since Edith’s presence, as he said and may have believed, enabled him to write as Fiona. In June, three months hence, he took Edith to meet George Meredith and introduced her as Fiona.
15 E. R. Lamson. This letter to Stedman and that of 5 March indicate the Lamson, Wolffe firm, which was established in 1895, was in financial difficulty. The following item in The Publisher’s Weekly, 1414 (4 March, 1899), p. 391, sheds light on the matter: “Lamson, Wolffe & Co., Publishers, have failed. Liabilities are reported to be $73,105.90 and assets, $26,748.72. The firm was organized by E. R. Lamson and Mr. Wolffe, then a student in Harvard. The latter was obliged to withdraw, owing to a college rule which prohibits students from engaging in business. Besides the office here, the firm also had an office in New York.” It is interesting to note that Stone and Kimball were undergraduates at Harvard when they planned their publishing firm. Sharp had the bad luck of associating himself sequentially with two firms started by Harvard students that failed after a few unprofitable years.
16 “The Red Rider: A Romance of the Garibaldian Campaign in the Two Sicilies” was issued serially in the Weekly Budget (London: James Henderson and Sons, Ltd., 1892).
17 Sharp did not proceed with this work.
18 On March 5, Sharp told Stedman he had been with Fiona Macleod at the shore “two days ago.” “In mind and body,” he said, “I am ten years younger, with that joy and delight.” Here on March 10, he tells Catherine Janvier, he had a “mental and physical set-back the last three days.” Apparently, his sound physical and mental health lasted only a few days — from March 3 to March 7. In order to be well in mind and body — at least in the winter — Sharp needed to be away from the smoke and fog of London. When he and Edith Rinder were alone together, he, at least, was attempting to communicate with the realm of spirits to obtain rituals for Yeats’s Celtic Mystical Order. Edith may have encouraged Sharp in this endeavor, but the extent to which she actively participated is unknown. The project provided an additional reason to be alone with Edith. Correspondence in May, 1898 casts some light on their contributions to Yeats’s project.
19 The Greco-Turkish War of 1897 was the result of Greece’s attempted annexation of Crete. Greece lost the war.
20 Four members of the European Concert — Great Britain, France, Italy, and Russia — were instrumental in bringing an end to the Greco-Turkish War.
21 Born at Ilfracombe, Devonshire, Coulson Kernahan (1858–1943) contributed to many periodicals, wrote humorous verse, and gained wide popularity for his fiction. Among his many books are: A Dead Man’s Diary (1890), A Book of Strange Sins (1893), The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil (1896), Scoundrels and Co. (1899), A World without a Child (1905), The Dumpling (1906), and The Duel (1906).
22 A. Harvey Moore was a popular British painter of the Victorian period who died in 1905.
23 Stone and Kimball published an edition of Sharp’s Vistas in Chicago in 1894 (The Green Tree Library), which contains a Foreword and an additional piece entitled “The Whisper.”
24 Flower o’ the Vine: Romantic Ballads and Sospiri di Roma (New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1892). This volume contained all the poems in Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy, and “The Last Voyage of Keir the Monk.” It also contained all of the poems in the 1891 edition of Sharp’s Sospiri di Roma and a new “Epilogue.”
25 Kernahan’s The Child, the Wise Man, and the Devil (London: J. Bowden and Co.,1896).
26 An American Journalist and critic. Hamilton Wright Mabie (1845–1916), was Associate Editor of The Outlook from 1884 until his death. There is no evidence to support Sharp’s claim to have been in France, but the references to Fiona’s Shorter Tales and Elizabeth’s being in bed with rheumatism seem to date the letter mid-March, about the same time as the letter to Kernahan. France may have been invented to explain Sharp’s delay in acknowledging Mabie’s books, the praise for which — from Fiona — is intended to encourage Mabie to print a favorable review of her reissued Shorter Tales in The Outlook.
27 Probably Mabie’s Books and Culture (New York: Dodd and Meade, 1896), and Essays on Nature and Culture (New York: Dodd and Meade, 1896).
28 Madge o’ the Pool: The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales was published by Archibald Constable and Co. late in 1896 or early January 1897. It was first published in Chicago by Stone and Kimball in 1895 under the title The Gipsy Christ and Other Tales. Since some found that title offensive, the British publisher decided to use another story, “Madge o’ the Pool,” as the primary title. The book was reviewed, among other places, in the Academy of March 6 (280).
29 The defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War.
30 Elizabeth noted here: “The letter ends abruptly.” She does not elaborate, but the hyperbolic assertions about the “spiral flames of the spirit” and the West reddening in a new light for the forlorn people of Ireland reflects the language he was hearing from Yeats and AE as they laid the groundwork for a Celtic-inspired revolution. The passage takes on new meaning when we realize the manic state of mind it reveals was enhanced by the psychic experiments he was conducting to discover rituals for Yeats’s Celtic Mystical Order.
31 Hinkson reprinted this letter in its entirety with only minor changes in Middle Years (pp. 130–33).
32 The Speaker: A Review of Politics, Letters, Science and the Arts (1890–1907) was a weekly paper which published articles on politics, science and the arts, as well as verse, foreign correspondence, letters to the editor and reviews of books. Its title became The Speaker, The Liberal Review in October 1899.
33 This article did not appear.
34 Charles O’Conor (1838–1906) was a Roman Catholic politician. As a liberal for Roscommon County from 1860–1880, he frequently spoke on Irish education and land tenure. He held an honorary LL. D. from the Royal University of Ireland and was mainly responsible for the Irish Sunday Closing Act of 1879. He was President of the Royal Irish Academy and the Irish Language society.
35 Norman MacLeod (1812–1872) was a distinguished minister of the Scottish Church. He studied at Glasgow and Edinburgh and was ordained in 1838. He was made one of the Royal Chaplains in Scotland in 1857, and became a trusted friend of Queen Victoria. He was the first editor of Good Words, to which he contributed many articles and stories.
36 Maud Gonne (1866–1953) was the daughter of Colonel Gonne who had been on the staff of the Irish command. She was an ardent Irish Nationalist and a close friend of W. B. Yeats. His devotion to her, along with their association in the cause of Irish independence and in the Irish Theatre Movement during the nineties and the early years of the twentieth century, inspired some of his finest lyric poems. In 1903, she married John MacBride, who had recruited and led the Irish Brigade in the Boer War and who was executed following the Easter insurrection in Dublin in 1916. Their son, Sean MacBride, would become Irish Minister for External Affairs (1948–1951).
37 Annie MacDonald’s article “Fiona Macleod” appeared in The Bookman, 2 (October, 1895), 135–36.
38 After reproducing this letter in Middle Years (p. 132), Hinkson stated: “With regard to this last letter Mrs. Sharp writes that ‘the autobiographical details given in it are fictitious details, which were used in order to prevent the assumption by the recipient of the letter that the writer was William Sharp: that it was his imperative desire from the outset of that phase of his work that the secret of the authorship should be preserved till his death; that through the loyalty of the few friends who knew that he and he alone was Fiona Macleod, and by means of efforts of his own, the wish was fulfilled.’”
39 See Endnote 28. The location of Little’s review of Madge o’ the Pool is unknown, but it may have appeared in the West Sussex Gazette for which he sometimes wrote reviews.
40 Little was planning to go to Paris with a press pass to review the annual Salons. William or Elizabeth Sharp attended the Salons each year and reviewed them for the Glasgow Herald. Sharp was planning to go elsewhere for two or three weeks at the beginning of April, he did not go abroad, but to St. Margaret’s Bay near Dover in Kent. See Sharp’s letter To Elizabeth Sharp [April 18, 1897] (Volume 2). E. A. S. did attend the two 1897 Salons and then went south to spend time with the Janviers in St. Remy
41 Sharp took a woman, almost certainly Edith Rinder, pretending to be Fiona Macleod to meet Meredith at Box Hill on June 10, 1897. In a letter to Alice Meynell dated June 13, 1897, Meredith described her as “a handsome woman, who would not give me her eyes for awhile.” In a letter to Maud Gonne dated January 14, 1907, Yeats recalled Meredith saying “she was the most beautiful woman he ever saw.” To my knowledge, this is the only time Sharp was able to convince Edith to meet one of his friends as Fiona (see Yeats Annual, No. 14, p. 182 and note, and The Gonne-Yeats Letters, ed. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares, London: Hutchinson, 1992, p. 234).
42 The photograph he sent with this letter is reproduced in the “Life” section of this chapter. Ms. Moulton wrote on the side of the card “This letter reached me on April 10 — just the other day.”
43 This letter is transcribed from a draft in Sharp’s handwriting with W. E. Henley’s name and address in the upper left corner. The draft was for Mary Sharp to copy in the Fiona Macleod hand. W. E. Henley (1849–1903) was a well-known poet, editor, arbiter of taste, and man of letters. He edited London (1877–1882) and the Magazine of Art (1882–1886). In 1889, he became editor of the Scots Observer and continued in that position when the magazine was transferred to London and retitled the National Observer in 1891. He resigned his editorship in 1894. As an editor, he was a leading opponent of 1890’s “decadence.” It is not surprising he encouraged Fiona to simplify her style. His best-known poem, “Invictus” was written in 1875 and published in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses (1888). It is best known for its concluding stanza: “It matters not how strait the gate,| How charged with punishments the scroll,| I am the master of my fate: | I am the captain of my soul.” The stanza alludes to Matthew 7:14 in the King James Bible: “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.”
44 An area in the far northwest of Scotland.
45 This article did not appear. “Fiona Macleod,” an article which appeared in The Critic, 48 (May, 1906), 460–63, is the only piece by Miss Rea that has been located.
46 Benjamin Burgess Moore was an undergraduate at Yale University who wrote an article about the Fiona Macleod writings that appeared in the Yale Literary Magazine.
47 Introducing this fragment, E. A. S. said, “Towards the end of April I went to Paris to write upon the two ‘Salons,’ and my husband, still very unwell, went to St. Margaret’s Bay.” Sharp told Little in his letter of March 24 the “Old Salon” would open on April 14 and the “New Salon” on April 20. Elizabeth was in Paris on those dates for the press previews which would date this letter Sunday, April 18.
48 These essays appeared in Maeterlinck’s The Treasure of the Humble, tr. by Alfred Surto (London: Grant Allen, 1897).
49 The final sentence ending in an ellipsis (either reflecting the original or cut off by E. A. S.) refers to his relationship with E. W. R. who was with him at least part of the time in St. Margaret’s Bay. The marriage metaphor to define the relationship between the two sides of his nature takes on a deeper significance when we know he was, at this time, frequently conflating Edith Rinder with Fiona Macleod, the female “second self” he had within. He asserted that he needed to be with Edith in order to think and write as Fiona. Identifying with her, adopting her perspective, facilitated, he thought, his ability to write as a woman. Elizabeth said of Sharp’s use of the name “Wilfion:”
In surveying the dual life as a whole I have seen how, from the early partially realised twin-ship, “W. S.” was the first to go adventuring and find himself, while his twin, “F. M.,” remained passive, or a separate self. When “she” awoke to active consciousness “she” became the deeper, the more impelling, the more essential factor. By reason of this severance, and of the acute conflict that at times resulted therefrom, the flaming of the dual life became so fierce that “Wilfion” — as I named the inner and third Self that lay behind that dual expression — realised the imperativeness of gaining control over his two separated selves and of bringing them into some kind of conscious harmony (Memoir, p. 423).
50 The Laughter of Peterkin: A Retelling of Old Tales of the Celtic Wonderland (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1897).
51 Felix Gras (1844–1901) was a poet, novelist, and prominent member of the Félibrige, becoming its president in 1891. His works include Li Carbounié; Toloza; The Reds of the Midi; and The White Terror (1899).
52 Marie Josephine (Girard) Gasquet (1872–1960) was the author of Une fille de Saint François (1922), Une enfance provençale (1926–1941), Sainte Jeanne d’Arc (1929), and La Fête-Dieu (1932). E. A. S is referring to a title Gasquet received at the Floral Games, an event the Félibrige held every seven years. At the Games a poet laureate was crowned, after which he would choose a queen. Gasquet must have been the reigning queen in 1897. For more on the Félibrige, see Endnote 53.
53 Frédéric Mistral (1830–1914) was a poet who led the nineteenth-century revival of Provençal language and literature. He was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1904 for his contributions to literature and philology. In 1854 he and several friends founded the Félibrige, which was dedicated to maintaining Provençal culture. His works include Miréio (1859), Lou Pouémo dóu Rose (1897), and his memoirs, Moun Espelido (1906), which was his most popular work.
54 This and another letter from Elizabeth Sharp are included here to demonstrate her acute intelligence, and the range of her literary and cultural interests. Her entry to the Félibrige was provided by Catherine and Thomas Janvier. The remainder of the letter is missing.
55 The card is postmarked May 7, 1897. Its content indicates its likely date is May 6.
56 Interestingly, these are the three most important women in Sharp’s life at this time: E. A. S, E. W. R., and Catherine Ann Janvier. Grant R. is Grant Richards, a mutual friend. The paragraph casts light on Gilchrist’s personality, and suggests a predisposition for gossip. It also illuminates the relationship between Sharp and Gilchrist, who was ten years Sharp’s junior.
57 Sharp left London on Friday, May 14 for St. Remy, where he surprised Elizabeth on Sunday morning, celebrated her birthday on Monday, May 17, and left again for London on May 18, arriving there on the evening of Wednesday, May 19. On Thursday, May 20, he wrote to Elizabeth that he was not sure a week ago if he would be able to make the “flying visit.”
58 E. A. S. had received Gilchrist’s photograph, as had Sharp, who asked Gilchrist to send one to Edith Rinder. The Stone Dragon was a collection of Gilchrist’s short stories published in 1894.
59 Cartledge is a hamlet in Derbyshire which grew around Cartledge Hall, where Murray Gilchrist lived with his partner, mother, and sisters. The content of the important letter Sharp received during his brief visit remains a mystery. Built in the late fifteenth century, Cartledge Hall is a Grade II listed building.
60 This post card was intended as a post script to a letter (now missing) Sharp sent to Stedman in the preceding mail.
61 “L” refers here to the publisher Lamson, who owed Sharp money which Stedman was trying to collect for him.
62 For date, see Endnote 60.
63 I have been unable to locate the essay on Maurice Maeterlinck or the monograph on Sir William Quiller Orchardson RA (1832–1910), a Scottish portraitist and painter of domestic and historical subjects who was knighted in June 1907. Sharp may not have completed either one.
64 Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), a Unitarian minister, was active in the American Abolitionist movement during the 1840s and 1850s. From 1862–1864, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment the first federally authorized black regiment. Following the war, he devoted his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women and other disfranchised peoples. A prolific author long associated with The Atlantic Monthly, he was an early supporter of Emily Dickinson, and following her death he collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd in publishing several volumes of her poetry.
65 May 24 was a Monday in 1897. After returning from France on Wednesday, May 19, Sharp went to Edinburgh for the weekend, returning to London on Monday, May 24. On the weekend (May 28–29), he went north again to spend a week with Murray Gilchrist at his home, Cartledge Hall, in Derbyshire.
66 “William Sharp, May. 1897.” has been typed onto the letter just below where Sharp had written “Monday,” and May 24 was a Monday in 1897.
67 Fiona Macleod’s “The Wayfarer,” was published in Cosmopolis (June, 1898), pp. 613–26. A revised version was included in Fiona Macleod’s The Winged Destiny (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904). In 1906, it was published by Thomas Mosher as a separate volume, prefaced by a sonnet, “In Memoriam,” by Alfred Noyes.
68 These two stories were in The Washer of the Ford and Other Legendary Moralities (Edinburgh: P. G. Geddes and Colleagues, 1896).
69 Richard Alexander Streatfeild (1866–1919) was a musicologist and critic. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and worked in the Department of Printed Books in the British Museum from 1889, until his death at the age of fifty-three.
70 George Darley (1795–1846) was an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic, and author of mathematical texts. In 1820, he received a B.A. from Trinity College Dublin in mathematics and classics. In 1821, he went to London to pursue a literary career and began publishing poetry and fiction. In 1827, he joined The Athenaeum as a critic. In 1897, R. A. Streatfeild published Darley’s unfinished lyrical epic Nepenthe: A Poem in Two Cantos (1835), which was distinguished by its dream imagery, use of symbolism to reveal inner consciousness, and tumultuous metrical organization.
71 Robert Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) was an English poet, dramatist and art scholar. A colleague of R. A. Streatfeild at the British Museum, he designed the woodcut that was the frontispiece of Streatfeild’s edition of Nepenthe, a design Sharp thought Blakean.
72 Gilchrist’s A Peakland Faggot: Tales Told of Milton Folk was published in 1897 by Grant Richards, in London. It is a collection of stories set in his native Peak district near Sheffield in Derbyshire. The village called Milton was based on the village of Eyam and many of the stories contain characters based on people who lived in and near Eyam. Long after Gilchrist died in 1917, a selection of his stories with a memoir by his friend Eden Phillpotts (1862–1960) was published under the title A Peakland Faggot (Faber & Gwyer: London, 1926).
73 A handwritten letter from Gilchrist.
74 See Endnote 72. The Jubilee was a year-long celebration in 1897 of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1847.
75 The Laughter of Peterkin: A Retelling of Old Tales of the Celtic Wonderland (London: Archibald Constable & Co.) was published in November 1897.
76 This sentence references the drug he and W. B. Yeats were occasionally using to facilitate the visions they hoped would produce the rites and talismans for Yeats’s projected Celtic Mystical Order. He and Gilchrist must have discussed the drug and its effects or, perhaps, smoked some together.
77 This birthday letter from Fiona Macleod to William Sharp is undated, but the date is established by the publication of F. M.’s The Laughter of Peterkin in November 1897 and by the date of Sharp’s birthday, September 12. The letter is in Sharp’s hand, not the Fiona Macleod hand provided by Mary Sharp. It must have been written when W. S. and E. A. S. were staying with friends at Good Rest | Parkstone | Dorset. He reminds himself that he must become more productive in the “new year,” but the letter is also an attempt to reaffirm and strengthen his sense of being two separate people. There is also, of course, a note of whimsy.
78 The Daughters of Danaeus was published by Bliss, Sands and Co. (London) in 1894. The Pathway of the Gods was published in 1898 by Skeffington and Son (London).
79 His father was Sharp’s friend, the novelist and poet George Meredith.
80 In his letter to Meredith, Sharp said he would be leaving London on September 15 or 16. If that expectation materialized, his destination is unknown. He was back in London when he wrote to Martyn which, from its description of his plans, must have been on September 22, for he tells Martyn that he will leave for Dublin tomorrow (Thursday, September 23), see George Russell there (Friday, September 24), leave Dublin on Saturday morning, and be at the Royal Hotel in Greenore, a port village on the East coast north of Dublin, on Sunday and Monday mornings, September 26 and 27. His plans after that, he tells Martyn, are uncertain, but he implies he will be travelling in Ireland until Saturday, October 2. The letters that follow indicate that, on the contrary, he made his way on Monday, September 27 to the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland, where he stayed four or five nights, before returning to Ireland and taking the train to Galway on Saturday, October 2. The letter he wrote to E. C. Stedman from Iona says he is staying there with Fiona Macleod. The Arran interlude in his visit to Ireland may have been pre-planned to enable him to spend time with Edith Rinder, who was spending the month of September, as usual, in a rented house on the mainland near Tarbert, just north of Arran.
81 Edward Martyn (1859–1923) inherited money, properties, and an impressive establishment (Tillyra Castle) near the town of Gort in the west of Ireland. British by heritage, he nonetheless considered himself an Irishman. He wrote plays and supported the Irish Dramatic Movement in the 1890s. He entertained his guests by playing the harmonium in the great hall of his castle. He founded the Palestrina Choir of Men and Boys in Dublin in 1899, and served as President of Sinn Fein from 1904 to 1908. In 1914, he founded in Dublin the Irish Theatre for the production of native non-peasant plays in the Irish language, and translations of continental master dramas. He was a promoter of the Gaelic league and other educational improvements for Ireland. Among his publications are Morgan Libraryte the Lesser (1890) and Preface to Robert Elliot’s Art and Ireland. His best-known plays include The Heather Field, Maeve, and The Dream Physician.
82 George Russell (AE) (1867–1935) was an Irish writer and painter, a close friend of W. B. Yeats, and, most significantly, a fellow member of the coterie Yeats had put together to find in the spirit world the elements of his projected Celtic Mystical Order. Russell had praised the writings of Fiona Macleod, and there is reason to believe Sharp, when he met Russell in Dublin, stated or implied strongly that he was producing the writings of Fiona Macleod. This confession seems not to have endeared Sharp to Russell, who before long began to attack Sharp’s ideas, as expressed through the F. M. writings, about Pan-Celticism. Russell remained fervently Irish and wanted to keep the Celtic Revival largely, if not exclusively, an Irish movement in order that it might further the Irish cause against the British. Among his publications are Homeward (1894), The Earth Breath (1897), The Divine Vision (1904), and Deirdre (1907).
83 The Laughter of Peterkin.
84 This may be a preliminary title for Fiona Macleod’s The Dominion of Dreams, which Archibald Constable and Co. published in May, 1899.
85 In the letter’s last paragraph, Sharp tells Stedman that he and F. M. will leave Arran the next day. In all likelihood, F. M., here and as in other letters to Stedman, was a stand-in for Edith Rinder, his “beautiful friend and comrade.”
86 Stedman was about to lose Mary Stewart, a good friend who did secretarial work, to marriage. The quotation marks suggest she may have had another name. Perhaps Sharp was implying Stedman had a romantic relationship with her and the “other friend” in the next sentence.
87 For a description of the Celtic gathering Sharp mentions in this letter, see my article, “W. B. Yeats, William Sharp, and Fiona Macleod.”
88 Sharp is referring here to Martin Morris (1867–1925), son of Baron Michael Morris. Martin Morris was an aspiring writer, whose article, “The Philosophy of Poetry,” had just appeared in The Nineteenth Century, 46 (September, 1897), 504–13. Martin succeeded to the title, Baron Morris of Killanin, when his father died in 1901.
89 A member of the English landed gentry in Ireland, Lady Augusta Gregory (1859–1932) played a crucial role in the Irish literary revival. Best known for welcoming W. B. Yeats every summer to stay at Coole Park, her estate in Galway, she collected and published stories gathered among the people who lived in the area. She also wrote plays and served for many years as a Director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Among her publications are Poets and Dreamers (1903), Gods and Fighting Men (1904), and Our Irish Theatre (1913). Her plays include The Image (1910), The Full Moon (1911), The Golden Apple (1916), and Three Last Plays (1928). Douglas Hyde and Standish O’Grady were crucial figures in the artistic, intellectual, social, and political movements that led eventually to Irish independence.
90 Sir William Nevill Geary (1859–1944), a well-known lawyer and diplomat, was a friend and neighbor of Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn.
91 E. A. S. said of this plan: “But the pressure of health, of the needs of daily livelihood, and of the more dominating ambitions of F. M. prevented the fulfilment of this scheme. Many times he talked of it, drafted out portions of it — but it remained unaccomplished, and all that exists of it is the beginning chapters of the first book written in Paris ten years before, and then called Caesar of France” (Memoir, p. 290).
92 Allen’s The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Enquiry into the Origin of Religions was published in 1897 by Grant Richards in London and Henry Holt in New York.
93 Le Gallienne’s If I Were God: A Conversation was published in 1897 by James Bowden in London. This booklet was an effort to reconcile the loss of his first wife in 1894 with his faith in God. “The best and finest thing he has done” may be Le Gallienne’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, subtitled “a paraphrase from several literal translations,” which was published, also in 1897, by Grant Richards.
94 In 1897, Le Gallienne married Julie Nørregaard, a Danish journalist. Their daughter, Eva le Gallienne, went on to become a famous actress.
95 E. A. S. said of this letter: “London proved to be impossible to him owing to the excitable condition of his brain. Therefore he took rooms in Hastings whence he wrote to me.”
96 Sharp is withdrawing, at Lady Gregory’s request, from serving as Chair at a meeting of the Irish Literary Society in London on December 4, where Yeats was scheduled to give a lecture on the Celtic movement. Yeats had written to Sharp on November 20 asking him to withdraw in favor of Edward Martyn, but Sharp had refused. A. P. Graves, Secretary of the Society, had asked Sharp to assume the Chair for the occasion without asking Yeats’s approval of his choice. Yeats thought that having Sharp, a Scotsman and with minimal public credentials as a Celtic writer, in the Chair would undermine the seriousness of the meeting and cast a bad light on what Yeats wanted to say to fellow members of the Society. Sharp was offended by Yeats’s request. When Lady Gregory spoke to Sharp, he was resistant. She promptly invited him to dinner, and when he accepted on the condition he could bring his wife, she knew her objective had been accomplished. See Collected Letters II, p. 148; and Augusta Gregory, Lady Gregory’s Diaries: 1892–1902, ed. James Pethica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 156–57.
97 Stedman’s Poems Now First Collected (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897).
98 Date from postmark.
Chapter 17
1 Elizabeth Sharp dated this letter May 1898, but it was probably written in February. St. Margaret’s Bay was one of the places he stayed during his absences from London in January and February. In writing to his wife, Sharp frequently omitted a return address and the date. Since Elizabeth assigned a month but no day to the letter, it was probably written without a date on the stationery of the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel which contained a drawing of the establishment. Its content reflects his state of mind in February, not in April. When he arrived in St. Margaret’s Bay on April 29, he was not “serenely at peace with the world.” Rather, he was in a state of near panic at having to abort his plan to take Edith Rinder to Paris as Fiona Macleod to meet W. B. Yeats and his friends. This is the first of two letters E. A. S. received from her husband in the spring of 1898 and used in the Memoir to reflect his thinking (pp. 294–98). This letter, she said, “gives an insight into the primitive and elemental soul that so often swayed him, and his work.” The “Life” section of this chapter contains more about the two letters and their context.
2 See letter To Elizabeth A. Sharp, [October 4, 1897] (Volume 2) and the statement in his letter To Edmund Clarence Stedman, March 1, 1898 (Volume 2) that he is working on “a romance of the destinies of France.”
3 E. A. S. implied this letter “to a friend” was written shortly after the preceding letter (Memoir, p. 298). She was meticulous in identifying the recipients of her husband’s letters except those he wrote to a “friend.” Edith Rinder probably allowed Elizabeth to use some of the letters she received from Sharp with the understanding that she would not be identified as the recipient.
4 E. A. S. said that this letter was written in St. Margaret’s Bay at the end of April. However, its content suggests that it was written in mid-February, since Sharp speaks of recovering from influenza and its side effects. Also, the publication of Fiona Macleod’s Dominion of Dreams “this Spring” remained a possibility when the letter was written. By February 25, according to the following letter to Benjamin Burgess Moore, that volume had been postponed for a least a year.
5 At this point, E. A. S. inserted in brackets: “published in the following year under the title of The Dominion of Dreams.” The volume was published by Archibald Constable and Co. in June 1899.
7 September, 1898, 595–98.
8 An etcher and art teacher, Charles Frederick William Mielatz (1860–1919) was born in Germany and immigrated at age six with his family to America. He married Mary Stuart McKinney on February 25, 1903 and resided thereafter in New York City.
9 An American Anthology 1787–1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Riverside Press, 1900).
10 Edith Rinder had visited Sharp frequently during the past two months. This sentence implies Sharp had shown a photograph of her to Stedman (probably during his trip to New York in November 1896) as he showed it to Yeats and Rhys and Le Gallienne in June 1897.
11 Poems Now First Collected (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1897).
12 This sentence suggests Edith Rinder was temporarily in Brussels, perhaps for further study of the Belgian writers she had translated and published in 1895 in The Massacre of the Innocents. In this letter, Sharp conveys a cavalier attitude toward his relationship with Edith Rinder, which he assumes Stedman will find compatible. The robust male camaraderie Sharp projected in his letters to Stedman reflected their in-person relationship. It is diametrically opposed to the manner in which Sharp was portraying his deep and overpowering love for Edith in the Fiona Macleod stories that made their way later into The Dominion of Dreams (1899). Sharp’s assuring Stedman that his “Queen” approved of his being “a very bad boy with a very dear & delightful ‘friend’” supports Elizabeth’s statement in the Memoir that she welcomed Edith’s cooperation in the effort to restore Sharp’s mental and physical health.
13 Sharp described this ambitious, unrealized project in his letter To Elizabeth A. Sharp, [October 4, 1897] (Volume 2) from Tillyra Castle. There, the first volume of The Epic of Youth was to be called “The Hunter of Wisdom.” None were completed.
14 The first half of this brief paragraph has been heavily crossed out and is illegible. The lines reproduced here have also been struck through but remain legible. Sharp was trying to raise Stedman’s spirits by referring to his relationship with a young woman and expressing his hope the relationship is ongoing.
15 The references to his own and Stedman’s relationships with women led Sharp to ask Stedman to burn the letter.
16 Macleay had left The Highland News in Inverness and was working for a Liverpool paper.
17 After including portions of this letter in the Memoir (pp. 294–6), E. A. S. destroyed the manuscript. The portions she printed in the Memoir, transcribed here, present important insights into the nature of their relationship with each other and their relationship with Edith Rinder. Elizabeth said this letter “relates to views we held in common,” opinions about love and the harmful effects of conventional restrictions. The letter is discussed in the “Life” section of this chapter.
18 Sharp left London on Friday, April 29 for Paris, but made it only to Dover, where he spent a fortnight at the St Margaret’s Bay Hotel. His intent had been that both he and Edith Rinder would go to Paris to meet Yeats and his friends, but that plan did not materialize, probably because Edith in the end refused to play the role of Fiona Macleod. Rather, she seems to have joined Sharp at the St. Margaret’s Bay Hotel on April 30 and stayed for at least a week.
19 The reference is to William Sharp’s Wives in Exile, a “yachting romance” that was published first in America and then, in July 1898, by Grant Richards (1872–1948) in England. The nephew of Sharp’s friend Grant Allen, Richards left his London boarding school in 1888 at the age of sixteen to become a writer. A menial job in a London wholesale bookstore sustained him for several months whereupon he was hired by W. T. Stead as a staff writer on the Review of Reviews. In that position he met many writers and became an active participant in the London literary scene of the early 1890s. On January 1, 1897, with backing from his uncle and others, he opened his own publishing firm in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden which through many ups and downs published many of the important British writers of the late nineties and the early twentieth century. Grant described his life before becoming a publisher in Memories of a Misspent Youth, 1872–1896 (London: William Heinemann, 1932) and his life as a publisher in Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sportsman, Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing (London: Unicorn, 1934; with a revised edition with a preface by Alec Waugh and a postscript by Martin Secker published in 1960).
20 Richard Vynne Harold’s Love Letters: A Romance in Correspondence (New York: Zimmerman’s, 1898), which Grant Richards was considering for publication in England.
21 This postcard is postmarked April 30, ’98 from Dover and addressed to Yeats at Chez M. Macgregor Mathers, 87 Rue Mozart, Paris. On April 25, 1898, Yeats had written to Lady Gregory: “I have been here in Paris for a couple of days… . I am buried in Celtic mythology and shall be for a couple of weeks or so. Miss Gonne has been ill with bronchitis… . She comes here to-morrow to see visions. Fiona Macleod (this is private as she is curiously secret about her movements) talks of coming here too, so we will have a great Celtic gathering.” In a postscript to this letter, Yeats added: “My host is a Celtic enthusiast who spends most of his day in highland costume to the wonder of the neighbours.” His host was Macgregor Mathers (Collected Letters II, pp. 214–15).
22 This sentence reinforces the point that Sharp had by this time told Yeats that Fiona Macleod was a second self or a spiritual presence whose appearance was dependent on the presence of the woman he loved. In an article entitled “William Sharp and Fiona Macleod,” The Century Magazine, 74 (May, 1907), 111–17, Ernest Rhys said Sharp arranged to meet him and Yeats sometime before May, 1900, to make a “confession” concerning the Fiona Macleod stories and romances. Rhys says that what Sharp told them on this occasion “entirely corroborated what he had told me casually at other times, and I see no reason to doubt that, while the account was colored, it represented a genuine mental experience, and was psychologically true. Its effect was this: that he, wishing to interpret nature and the supernatural, and all their occult human contingencies had never been able to attain what he called ‘vision,’ until after an illness and some fever he found himself newly sensitized, and made the vehicle of a woman’s vision — one far exceeding his own. Then, and not till then, he became the instrument of that creative work which, actually written down by himself, was yet the positive result of a dual state of consciousness, new, he thought, to human experience.” I believe the “confession” meeting occurred in June 1897, about the time he took Edith to Box Hill to play Fiona Macleod for George Meredith.
23 The Plain of Moytura, located in County Mayo, was the site of two great battles in Irish mythical history, the first between the Danaans and the Firbolgs and the second between the Danaans and the Fomorians. Here, Sharp refers to a modern abridged translation by Whitley Stokes from a fifteenth-century manuscript in the British Museum describing “The Second Battle of Moytura,” Revue Celtique, 12 (1891), 52–130, with corrections and notes 306–08.
24 Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (1827–1910) was a Celtic scholar, the first to head the Department of Celtic Language and Literature at the College de France. In 1885 he assumed direction of the Revue Celtique (1870–1934). His most important book was The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology translated into English in 1903. Yeats knew him, or of him, as early as 1890, and he is cited by Virginia Moore as being the “best equipped and most esteemed Celtic scholar” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (The Unicorn: W. B. Yeats Search for Reality (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1954), p. 50).
25 A prominent figure in the Irish Literary Revival and the Irish Nationalist movement, Hyde (1860–1949) championed the revival of the Irish language and served from 1938–1945 as the first President of Ireland.
26 Richard Vynne Harold’s Love Letter.
27 The letter’s approximate date is “a few days” after Sharp arrived in Lanzardle on April 29. It is likely that Edith joined him there on April 30 and quite possible that she had become ill since Sharp described Fiona as ill on April 30 and again on May 5. He may well have thought he might be leaving the next day, but it appears that Edith left on the weekend (May 7) and Sharp stayed for another week.
28 Charles Le Goffic (1863–1932) was a Breton poet, novelist and historian whose influence was especially strong in his native Brittany. A translation of his Le Crucifié de Kéraliès (1892) by Edith Wingate Rinder was published in April 1898 under the title The Dark Way of Love by Archibald Constable and Co. As Sharp indicates, a favorable notice of the book appeared in The Scotsman of May 2, 1898.
29 The Laughter of Peterkin (1897) was not published in America.
30 Vol. 79 (November 27, 1897), 774.
31 “Children of the Dark Star,” The Dome (May, 1898), 39–58.
32 April, 1898, 245–6.
33 June, 1898, 614–26.
34 September, 1898, 595–98
35 Sharp probably composed this letter shortly after arriving in St. Margaret’s Bay and sent it to his sister in Edinburgh for transcription.
36 This strange letter responds to two letters from Yeats — one to Sharp and a second to Fiona — asking about visions he and Macgregor Mathers had in Paris involving Sharp and Fiona. The content of the letter is described in the “Life” section of this chapter. This sentence implies that Edith Rinder left St. Margaret’s Bay after a week, though Sharp stayed on till mid-month.
37 The May 1898 issue of The Dome contained, in addition to Fiona Macleod’s “Children of the Dark Star” (39–58), Yeats’s “Aedh to Doctora: Three Songs” (37–38). The three songs were: “Aedh hears the cry of the Sedge,” “Aedh Laments the Loss of Love,” and “Aedh thinks of those who have spoken Evil of his Beloved.”
38 After “only” there is a space in the MS letter where one or two lines have been erased. Sharp must have had second thought about what he had written. In the next postscript he attributes the mid-sentence break to Fiona’s neuralgia.
39 Yeats’s response to this letter, both in a May 7 letter to Sharp and many years later in writing his autobiography, is discussed in the “Life” section of this chapter.
40 John Arthur Goodchild (1851–1914) was a medical doctor who cared for his British patients in Italy during the six darker months of the year and in England for the remainder. He was also a serious student of the early civilizations of Ireland, England, and Scotland and had a special affection for the Celts and early converts to Christianity. He responded favorably to the writings of Fiona Macleod and valued Sharp’s knowledge the Celtic past. The book Fiona thanked him for was a collection of his poetry called The Book of Telphi (1897). His best-known publication was The Light of the West (1898), and Fiona also thanked him for a proof copy of that work. Fiona Macleod’s The Winged Destiny (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904) contained a “Dedicatory Introduction to J. A. G.”
41 The mid-May date of this letter is based on the assumption that Fiona received the proof copy of The Light of the West shortly after it was published.
42 According to E. A. S. (Memoir, p. 293), this letter was written after Sharp returned to London from St. Margaret’s Bay. He returned at the start of the third week of May, or about May 15, and, after spending May 17 with his wife on her birthday, he left with Thomas Janvier on May 18 for a four-day walking tour in Holland.
43 “The White Heron,” Harper’s Magazine (December, 1898), 71–8.
44 “Enya of the Dark Eyes,” Literature, 47 (September, 1898).
45 This reference, according to Mrs. Sharp, is to The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900).
46 Although Sharp claimed at the start of the letter to have regained his health, the letter suggests his mental state remained precarious.
47 This letter from Elizabeth to Gilchrist is included for its demonstration of her patience, good will, and genuine concern for the state of her husband’s physical and mental health, despite the fact that he had been separated from her for most of the previous five months as she worked in London to earn money to support them.
48 Marken Island of the coast of Holland.
49 Richards had asked Sharp for some favorable notices of the American publication of Wives in Exile he could use to promote the book which was scheduled for publication in July.
50 Richards’s good news is explained in a sentence from his memoir Author Hunting (p. 116): “Some time in the early spring of 1898, I became engaged to a young Italian lady; in May of the same year we were married.”
51 “O sweet Spring filled with fragrance and love.”
52 Sharp had found some favorable notices of the American edition of Wives in Exile for Richards to use promoting the English edition which he published in July.
53 Yeats had given Sharp typescripts of some of the poems that would appear in The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899) with the hope he would carry through on his promise to mention the book as forthcoming. A review of Wind Among the Reeds appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod in the Dublin Daily Express on April 22, 1899, shortly after the volume appeared. The Shadowy Waters and The Wind Among the Reeds are discussed in “The Later Work of Mr. Yeats,” also by Fiona Macleod, in The North American Review of September, 1902.
54 Sharp as Fiona Macleod was referring to Yeats’s recent critical work in prose: “Le Mouvement Celtique” (which focuses on Fiona Macleod) in L’Irlande Libre (April, 1898), “Irish Fairy Land” in The Outlook (April, 1898), “The Broken Gates of Death” in the Fortnightly Review (April, 1898), and “The Celtic Element in Literature” in Cosmopolis (June, 1898) which also contained “The Wayfarer” by Fiona Macleod.
55 At this point, thirteen lines have been blotted out, probably by Yeats or perhaps by Mrs. Sharp if Yeats loaned the letter to her when she was writing the Memoir. The lines are not decipherable.
56 From this point through to “early life,” lines have been blotted out but are decipherable.
57 From this point through to “one,” the lines have been blotted out but are decipherable.
58 The ellipsis is in the MS letter.
59 It was not impossible for Sharp as he used the subject as the basis for a story called “The Distant Country” which was included in Fiona Macleod’s The Dominion of Dreams in 1899.
60 There is an eight-line postscript to the letter which has been crossed through line-by-line and is not decipherable. It probably asks Yeats to destroy the letter because of its very personal nature. Again as Fiona, Sharp wrote a brief note to Yeats on July 6 asking if he received her letter of June 28 and saying she was anxious about it. That is understandable because here Sharp described metaphorically how he wanted Yeats to understand his relationship with Edith Rinder which enabled him to write as Fiona Macleod. He distanced himself only slightly — by the “long ago” — from the man, half Celt and half Norse as was Sharp, who possessed “one of the subtlest and strangest minds of his time.” To his “genius, ancestral memory, creative power,” she brought her Beauty, her vision, her dreams, her thought, and her life. Their love for each other brought them together in a spiritual union. A mystical melding of the two produced the shaping power that enabled Sharp to write the stories and poems of Fiona Macleod.
61 Among these projected titles, the only story to appear was “The Merchant of Dreams,” which can be found in Volume V of The Selected Writings of William Sharp (London: William Heinemann, 1912).
62 “Sir Edward Burne-Jones,” The Atlantic Monthly, 82 (September, 1898), 375–83. “Edward Burne-Jones,” The Fortnightly Review, 70 (August, 1898), 289–306.
63 The anxiety is due to the fact that the Fiona Macleod letter To William Butler Yeats, June 28, 1898 (Volume 2) describes as material for a story the relationship between William Sharp and Edith Rinder that produced the Fiona Macleod writings. This relationship and its effects were known to only a few, and their general discovery would have had disastrous effects on Sharp’s personal and creative life. This explains his concern about what may have happened to the June 28 Fiona Macleod letter to Yeats.
64 William Leonard Courtney (1850–1928) was a philosopher, journalist, and editor who became the editor of the influential Fortnightly Review in 1894 and remained in that position until 1928. His books include The Metaphysics of John Stuart Mill (1879), The Development of Maeterlinck (1904), and The Soul of a Suffragette (1913).
65 The Reverend Donald Macleod (d. 1911) served as Minister of the Parish of the Park in Glasgow and edited Good Words from 1872–1905. His publications include Christ and Society (1893) and Memoir of Norman Macleod (1876)
66 Clement King Shorter (1857–1926) was a journalist and author who, after working as editor on various London news and periodical publications, founded The Sphere in 1900 which he edited until his death. He also founded The Tatler in 1901 and, much earlier, he had helped establish the Omar Khayyam Club, of which Sharp was a member. His publications include Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (1896), Napoleon’s Fellow Travelers (1909), and George Borrow and his Circle (1913).
67 E. A. S. was a member of the Sesame Club and W. S. of the Grosvenor Club.
68 So woefully far on in the year.
69 If the Richards left for Cornwall on Saturday July 23, they might have had tea with the Sharps on Monday, July 18. In any case, Sharp had met the new Mrs. Richards when he next wrote to her husband early in 1899.
70 Mrs. Sharp printed (Memoir, pp. 299–300) Rhys’ reply to this letter:
Dear “Fiona Macleod,” I believe I never wrote to thank you for your story in the Dome, which I read eventually in an old Welsh tower. It was the right place to read such a fantasy of the dark and bright blindness of the Celt: and I found it, if not of your very best, yet full of imaginative stimulus. Not many weeks ago, in very different surroundings, Mr. Sharp read me a poem — two poems — of yours. So I feel that I have the sense, at least, of your continued journeys thro’ the divine and earthly regions of the Gael, and how life looks to you, and what colours it wears. What should we do were it not for that sense of the little group of simple and faithful souls, who love the clay of earth because heaven is wrapt in it, and stand by and support their lonely fellows in the struggle against them? I trust at some time it may be my great good fortune to see you and talk of these things, and hear more of your doings. Ernest Rhys. |
71 Rhys’s Welsh Ballads and Other Poems (London: David Nutt, 1898).
72 A fourteenth-century Welsh poet.
73 George Moore’s Evelyn Innes (New York: Appleton & Co., 1898).
74 The Dominion of Dreams (1899).
75 “The Hour of Beauty” became “The Immortal Hour” and was published in the Fortnightly Review in November 1900. “The King of Ys” and “Dahut the Red” were intended by Sharp to form part of a series of plays to be published collectively as The Theatre of the Soul or The Psychic Drama. Neither the plays nor the series materialized. See “Bibliographical Note” in Poems and Dramas, Vol. VII of The Works of Fiona Macleod, Unified Edition arranged by Mrs. William Sharp (London: William Heinemann, 1910), p. 448.
76 The Isle of Colonsay in Argyll is not far off-shore from Kilcreggan where Sharp seem to have spent most of his time for the first three weeks of August. In a July 4 letter, Yeats told Sharp that Martyn was too upset by his mother’s death (on May 12) to invite anyone to Tillyra, but might change his mind. He also promised to speak to Martyn about inviting Sharp if the occasion arose. Apparently, Martyn did invite Sharp, but the formality and cool tone of Sharp’s response suggest Martyn’s invitation was less cordial and welcoming than it might have been.
77 The remaining page or pages of this letter are missing.
78 Date from postmark; postcard addressed to Eldridge Court | Chicago.
79 The concluding sentence was written vertically on the left side of the postcard and the writing is difficult to make out. The sense seems to be that Fiona Macleod would also like copies of the books she published with Stone and Kimball — Pharais (1895); The Sin-Eater (1896); and The Washer of the Ford (1896) — in lieu of royalty payments.
80 The card is postmarked Glasgow, Aug 24,’98. Since Sharp says he is “en route,” he must have been returning to London from Kilcreggan, Argyll.
81 Wives in Exile (1898).
82 Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins (1863–1933) was a novelist and playwright who used the pseudonym Anthony Hope. Someone must have speculated in print that Hawkins was Hope. Sharp was pleased the article wasn’t speculating about him and Fiona. As Anthony Hope, Hawkins published, among other works, The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) and The Great Miss Driver (1908).
83 “Enya of the Dark Eyes” appeared in Literature; “The Last Night of Artan the Culdee” and “The Monody of Isle the Singer” appeared in The Dome, 1 [New Series] (October, 1898), 75–76.
84 The Stedman’s house was named for the Stedmans’s daughter, Laura.
85 The manuscript letter is in William Sharp’s hand for copying by Mary Sharp into the Fiona Macleod hand.
86 Ernest James Oldmeadow (1867–1949) was the editor of The Dome (1897–1900), music critic of The Outlook (1900–1904), editor of the Tablet (1923–1936), and the author of Chopin (1905), Aunt Maud (1908), A Babe Unborn (1911), and Miss Watts, an Old Fashioned Romance (1923).
87 “The Secrets of the Night” appeared in The Dome in January 1899, 68–69.
88 The addressee is probably Dora (Sigerson) Shorter (1866–1918), a novelist and poet from Ireland who married Clement Shorter in 1896. Her works include Ballads and Poems (1899), The Woman Who Went to Hell (1902), and Love of Ireland: Poems and Ballads (1916). See postscript to letter to Clement Shorter dated January 2, 1899.
89 “A Group of Celtic Writers,” The Fortnightly Review (January, 1899), 34–53, wherein Fiona Macleod said “The most notable new addition to this group of young writers is Miss Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter).”
90 The Pettycur Inn, Kinghorn, Fife (Memoir, p. 300).
91 Of these three titles, only one, “Honey of the Wild Bees,” appeared in The Dominion of Dreams.
92 “Thus onward to the stars!”
Chapter 18
1 Clement Shorter (1857–1926) was editor of the Illustrated London News. His wife was the Irish poet Dora Sigerson (1866–1918) who, after her marriage in 1895, wrote as Dora Sigerson Shorter. Born in Dublin, she contributed significantly to the Irish Literary Revival. Her work was mentioned in Fiona Macleod, “A Group of Celtic Writers”, The Fortnightly Review (January, 1899), 34–53. See Fiona’s letter To [Dora Sigerson Shorter, December, 1898] (Volume 2).
2 Silence Farm was published by Grant Richards (London) on June 13, 1899.
3 Like many of Sharp’s ambitious projects, this one failed to materialize. In a letter to E. A. S. in the fall of 1897, Sharp described a work of epic proportions that would contain and transmit all he had learned about life. At that time, it was to be six books under the general title “The Epic of Youth” (Memoir, p. 289).
4 Written on Grosvenor Club mourning stationery with that address crossed out and this address written over it.
5 Neil Munro (1863–1930) was an influential Scottish journalist and novelist. After serialization in Blackwood’s Magazine, his first novel John Splendid, The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn, was published in 1898 by William Blackwood And Sons (Edinburgh and London). It deals with the sack of Inverary by Montrose and his subsequent victory at the battle of Inverlochy in 1645.
6 “A Group of Celtic Writers.”
7 Pounds, shillings, pence.
8 This is the first of several letters Sharp addressed to Richards about the realistic novel he was writing. After much back and forth about royalties and other business matters, Richards accepted the book and published it on June 13, 1899.
9 This book never materialized.
10 In a memoir, Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sportsman: Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897–1925 (New York: Coward-McCann, 1934), Grant Richards wrote “Sometime in the early spring of 1898, I became engaged to a young Italian lady; in May of the same year we were married. I shall have, I think, no need to mention that marriage again, so I will confine myself to saying that my wife bore me children [three boys and a girl] and that the union was dissolved” (p. 135). The young lady he married was Elisina Palamidessi de Castelvecchio (1878–1959), the great-great-granddaughter of Napoleon’s brother Louis. In 1909, Elisina left her family to live with Royall Tyler, with whom she had a child in 1910. After her divorce from Richards in 1914, she married Tyler, and in 1915 Richards married a young Hungarian widow named Maria Magdalena de Csanády. Elisina was the first editor of Englishwoman which the Richards firm published from 1909–1921. Later, as Elisina Tyler, she became a close friend of the novelist Edith Wharton, and assisted with her charities during the First World War, becoming vice president of the American Hostels for Belgian Refugees and the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee. She was also chairman of the Franco-American Committee of the Viennese Children’s Fund. She was co-awarded (with Edith Wharton) the Médaille de la Reine Elisabeth by the Belgian government in 1918 for their work with refugees. Later, she was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. She and her husband acquired Antigny-le-Château, near Arnay-le-Duc, in 1923. Elisina became the executor of the French will and estate of Edith Wharton, and she inherited Wharton’s Sainte-Claire du Château, her property at Hyères, where she died in 1959. See https://www.doaks.org/research/library-archives for more information.
11 Grant Richards first visited the French Riviera in February 1899. In Author Hunting, he wrote: “William Sharp and Thomas A. Janvier collaborated in drawing up my itinerary” (p. 145). It was a delayed honeymoon trip with Elisina Palamidessi de Castelvecchio whom he married in May, 1898. Some years later, Richards wrote The Coast of Pleasure: An Unconventional Guide to the French Riviera.
12 Jules Bossière (1863–1897), poet, traveler, Chinese scholar, and opium addict, was a disciple of Mallarmé and the Symbolists. He wrote seven books in his short life, the two on opium usage his finest. Fumeurs d’opium, a collection of stories, was first published in 1896 and went through four editions. The autobiographical Propos d’un intoxiqué first appeared in 1911. He was one of the first French writers to study the action of opium on the intelligence and sensibilities (Arnould de Liedekerke, La Belle Epoque de l’Opium (Paris: Le Sphinx, 1984), p. 197). The suggestion that Edith Rinder translate Fumeurs d’opium for publication by Grant Richards did not materialize. Her translation of Le Crucifié de Keraliès by Charles Henri Le Goffic was published in 1898 under the title, The Dark Way of Love (Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1898).
13 The concept of a female redeemer, especially the St. Bride story, appears frequently in the Fiona writings.
14 This was published by Archibald Constable and Co. on May 27, 1899.
15 Egan Mew, who wrote for Literature, was living in Gray’s Inn Place, London. He wrote A London Comedy and Other Vanities (1897) and Historical Books of the World. He also wrote six books on porcelain — Japanese, Chinese, and British.
16 Although Egan Mew had written an announcement of Fiona Macleod’s forthcoming The Dominion of Dreams in Literature, she was nonetheless annoyed by his continued assumption that Fiona Macleod was a pseudonym.
17 Easter Monday, April 3.
18 This letter appeared in “Book of the Week,” a column by F. E. Green, in the January 21, 1909 issue of The New Age. The book that occasioned Green’s column was an edition of Fiona Macleod’s works called Songs and Poems, Old and New published posthumously that year by Eliot Stock. Frederick Ernest Green (1867–1922) was a prolific writer on agricultural policy. The circumstances that led to Fiona’s letter to Green, as recalled in Green’s column, are described in the “Life” section of this chapter.
19 Elizabeth Sharp recalled visiting Mr. and Mrs. Grant Allen in Surrey “at their charming house, The Croft, built among the heather and the pines on the hill-top just by the edge of the chasm called ‘The Devil’s Punch Bowl’” (Memoir, p. 317).
20 This card is postmarked April 10, 1899. Douglas Hyde’s A Literary History was published by Unwin in late April, 1899. Accompanying this card is a manuscript note which reads: “Hyde’s Literary History / Sent to Sharp per Pickford on the 8th. Signed for, / on behalf of Pickford, by A. Smith.”
21 Postcard postmarked April 12, 1899.
22 The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Matthews, 1899) was published on April 15, 1899. Pinar is a village northwest of London in Middlesex.
23 In his note to “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” the first poem in The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats indicated that the gods of ancient Ireland were known among the poor as the Sidhe and stated: “Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind” (p. 65).
24 A review of The Wind Among the Reeds signed Fiona Macleod appeared in the Dublin Daily Express on April 22, 1899. Sharp wrote about the volume again as Fiona Macleod in “The Later Work of Mr. W. B. Yeats,” The North American Review, 175 (October, 1902), 473–85. Sharp thought H. D. Traill’s weekly Literature would publish a review under his signature, but I have been unable to find this. Sharp’s opinions of the volume in the context of his ongoing relationship with Yeats are discussed in the “Life” section of this chapter.
25 Sharp wrote this letter on the train returning to London from Pinner where he had been for the evening.
26 The reference is to No. 5 St. John Street by Richard Whiteing (1840–1928), which Grant Richards had recently published. The book went through many editions and became Grant Richards’ first successful book.
27 Date from postmark.
28 Originally published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1895, a revised edition of Yeats’ Poems was published by Unwin on May 8, 1899.
29 The book’s official date of publication was May 27, 1899.
30 E. A. S. printed this sentence and the rest of the paragraph (Memoir, p. 307).
31 A journalist and aspiring novelist from Scotland, Macleay began his career as a writer for The Highland News in Inverness. Though he continued to write occasional pieces for that paper, he had recently moved to Liverpool to join the staff of the Liverpool Chronicle. He suspected that Fiona Macleod might be William Sharp and speculated on that point in both papers, usually quoting unnamed sources. Sharp was pulled between the need to keep Macleay at a distance from the truth while also encouraging him to write about Fiona in order to boost sales of her books.
32 Sharp was reviewing the annual exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art for either the Glasgow Herald or the Art Review.
33 Sharp finally left for France on Sunday April 30 or Monday May 1.
34 See Sharp’s letter To Grant Richards, [late January, 1899] (Volume 2).
35 Edith Sophy Balfour Lyttelton (1865–1948), later Dame Edith Lyttelton, was a playwright and author. Her works include Warp and Woof (1904); Peter’s Chance (1912); The Faculty of Communion (1925); and Our Superconscious Mind (1931). A prominent society hostess, she was the wife and biographer of Alfred Lyttelton (1857–1913), a Member of Parliament and, for a time, Secretary of State.
36 The Dominion of Dreams was published by Archibald Constable and Co. (Westminster) on May 27, 1899.
37 The remainder of this paragraph was reproduced separately by E. A. S. in the Memoir (306–07) where it is introduced by “to another correspondent he wrote” with the implication it was an extract from a William Sharp letter.
38 This letter was sent to Archibald Constable at the request of the publishers, who were worried that speculation about the identity of Fiona Macleod would interfere with sales of The Dominion of Dreams. It was sent to several publications. This transcription is from The Athenaeum, 3733 (May, 1899), 596. I am indebted to Michael Shaw for bringing this letter to my attention.
39 What follows are fragments of two or three letters Sharp wrote to Yeats. They were owned by Yeats’ son, Michael B. Yeats, who gave me copies. The paper and script of the fragments are similar, but how they fit together, if they do, is unclear. It is likely all three fragments were written when Sharp was in or near Paris in early May 1899. The fragment placed first here (ending at “special article”) was certainly written while Sharp was in Paris. The introduction to this section of the letters comments on his reading to the Mathers. The next fragment, which begins with “I send you a cutting” and ends with the first “Reddening of the West,” also deals with The Dominion of Dreams. In the final fragment, Sharp addresses the plays he will write as Fiona before the end of the summer for Yeats’ theatre in Dublin. It seems also to have been written in France since Sharp wrote two letters to Yeats after he returned to England both of which said he was seriously ill in France. It was surely written before May 29, when he cautioned Yeats against referring to “The Tarist” since he intended to name it “The King of Ireland’s Son.”
40 This is the first of several times Sharp expressed his desire for Yeats’ opinion of The Dominion of Dreams and his hope that Yeats would review the book. Without responding to Sharp about the book, Yeats reviewed it in the July 1899 issue of The Bookman. He praised the book, but also criticized its wordiness and overblown style. Sharp was greatly distressed at first by the criticism, but came to recognize Yeats’ comments were at least partially justified (Memoir, p. 308).
41 This sentence is written in the left margin of the page. Henry Duff Traill (1842–1900) had become the first editor of the weekly Literature in October 1897, and he directed its fortunes until his death. The subject of the “cutting” in the next line and the advice it must have contained are unknown.
42 The words in brackets are inserted above the line.
43 This book became The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores when it was published in early summer 1900 by Chapman and Hall (London). By then, Sharp’s relationship with Yeats had cooled, and the volume was not dedicated to him, but to EALASAIDH, which is Elizabeth (or E. A. S.) in Gaelic. In the spring and fall of 1899, he expected to finish and publish the book in November 1899.
44 This is the end of two pages that fit together. The next excerpt is from the beginning of two pages written side-by-side on a single sheet. Although we cannot be certain, these pages are likely part of the same letter as the two pages above.
45 This line is written in the left margin.
46 The page ends here, and the next page is missing.
47 Sharp probably returned from France on Monday May 22 and found waiting him an author’s copy of Silence Farm. See his letter To John Macleay, [April 25, 1899] (Volume 2). Richards had decided to delay official publication until June 13.
48 The Omar Khayyam Club was a group of literary men who met periodically for dinners, listened to each other deliver speeches, and inducted new members.
49 Henry D. Davray (1873–1944) wrote and translated for the Mercure de France. He was the author of Chez les Anglais pendant la Grande Guerre (1916), Through French Eyes: Britain’s Effort (1916), and Lord Kitchener: His Work and His Prestige (1917).
50 Frank Rinder was the husband of Edith Rinder, the woman Sharp loved, and their love is the subject of many stories in the book. In “The Distant Country,” for example, the female narrator describes a love affair that is so intense it threatens to burn itself out. His mention of this story may have been an indirect means of suggesting to Rinder that his affair with Edith was beginning to wane. The sentence Sharp quoted suggests he believed Rinder would concur that intense love between two human beings cannot be denied and whatever redemption might be required for the harm that love causes others comes only after death. This is one of very few letters from Sharp to the Rinders that Elizabeth used partially in the Memoir. Since she knew the facts of Sharp’s relationship with Edith would one day emerge, she must have wanted future readers to know that both she and Edith’s husband knew about and tolerated the love affair between their two spouses.
51 This statement dates the letter as Monday, May 29.
52 Yeats had asked Sharp to comment on or add to a draft of a ritual he had constructed for his Celtic Mystical order. A note in Collected Notes II (p. 422) says of this draft: “Probably an early version of ‘The Initiation of the Spear,’ which he [Yeats] had repeatedly experienced since 17 Dec 1898. By January 1899 WBY had also worked out a structure for the rituals based on cauldron, stone, sword, and spear related to the four seasons (‘Visions Notebook’).”
53 The area around Tara in County Meath in the east of Ireland. The ancient kings of Ireland were said to have their seat and hold their assemblies in Tara until 563. Ulidia or Uladlh (Ulla, i.e., Ulster), an original kingdom of ancient Ireland, became the northern province of Ulster composed of nine counties, six of which are now in Northern Ireland.
54 Kilkeel and Newcastle are seaport towns in County Down. Annalong is a fishing village five miles north of Kilkeel.
55 Sharp finished and published two plays under the Fiona Macleod pseudonym: “The House of Usna,” National Review, 35 (July, 1900), 733ff; and “The Immortal Hour,” The Fortnightly Review, 68 (November, 1900), 867–96. “The Tarist” and “The King of Ireland’s Son” were rejected titles for “The House of Usna.” “The King of Ireland’s Son” was probably rejected because it was the title of a poem by Nora Hopper which was quoted in “Dalvan,” a story in Ballads in Prose, 1894 (Collected Letters I, p. 54). In his letter To William Butler Yeats, September 16, 1899 (Volume 2), Sharp told Yeats “The House of Usna” and “The Immortal Hour” were the two finished plays (Memoir, p. 310). “The House of Usna” was performed “under the auspices of The Stage Society, of which William Sharp was the first Chairman” at the Fifth Meeting of the Society at the Globe Theatre, April 29, 1900. It was directed by Granville Barker, and Y. M. Capel wrote the music that accompanied it (Memoir, pp. 317–18). Two short plays by Maeterlinck were also performed that evening.
56 Gort is in County Galway near Coole Park, the residence of Lady Gregory, and not far from Edward Martyn’s Tillyra Castle.
57 Edward Verrall Lucas (1868–1938) was a versatile and popular English writer of nearly one hundred books. The Open Road went through many editions both in England and in America, where it was published by Henry Holt. Born in Kent, educated at Friends’ school in Saffron Walden, without university education he joined the staff at Punch in 1904 and wrote prolifically for the magazine. In 1924, he became chairman of the London publishers Methuen and Company. According to R. G. G. Price’s A History of Punch (London: Collins, 1957), his polished and gentlemanly essayist’s persona concealed “a cynical clubman … very bitter about men and politics … [with] the finest pornographic library in London” (194).
58 In his Thursday, June 8 letter to Little, Sharp said review copies were going out that week, the week preceding publication on June 13. This letter and the letter to Yeats, both of which are undated, similar in handwriting and some wording and written on the same stationery, were probably written early in the week of June 5, a Monday. I have therefore chosen that as the probable date of both letters.
59 Sharp asked Yeats several times in late May and June what he thought about The Dominion of Dreams and wondered if he would review the book. Having heard nothing on the subject from Yeats by the end of June, he was surprised, and more than a little annoyed, when he learned in early July that Yeats’ review had appeared in that month’s Bookman. This matter will be described in more detail in the “Life” section of Chapter Nineteen.
60 “The King of Ireland’s Son” became “The House of Usna.” Sharp is telling Yeats indirectly he is capable of writing contemporary “Irish” plays, which might be suitable for an Irish Literary Theater in addition to the Pan-Celtic dramas set in the mythic past. Political considerations had caused Yeats in late 1897 to shift the name of the theater he and others were developing in Dublin from “Celtic” to “Irish.”
61 E. A. S. combined this line and the last paragraph of this letter with passages from a letter to Yeats (which I have dated May 29) into what appears as a single letter in the Memoir. She omitted from both letters references to the possibility that Lady Gregory or Edward Martyn would invite them as guests to the West, references to their financial difficulties, references to the plays Sharp was writing as Fiona for Yeats’ Irish theater, and, most significantly, all references to the Rite for the Celtic Mystical Order
62 The bracketed words are crossed through in the manuscript letter, probably by Sharp since the inserted words “probably to the” appear to be in his hand. Presumably he wanted Yeats to think he had thought better about conveying his hope for an invitation while leaving enough to plant the idea.
63 The east coast north of Dublin in County Down.
64 Sharp had told Yeats, probably in June 1897, that he was responsible for the Fiona Macleod writings and that he experienced her as an alternative personality triggered and inspired by a real woman with whom he enjoyed an intimate relationship. Sharp was suffering one of his periodic bouts of depression.
65 This strange letter to Russell, which assumes a closer relationship between the two men than in fact existed, was written about the same time as the previous letter to Yeats, thus the probable date of June 5. It conveyed the same note of depression and disdain for city life in London that Sharp expressed to Yeats in his May 29 letter and again on June 5. Somewhat plaintively, Sharp asked AE to provide Fiona some “sympathy and comradely help” which she needed to refresh her soul. He must have done so right away since Fiona, in a letter dated June 17, thanked AE for his “friendly and sincere letter.”
66 In her letter To John Macleay, May 31, 1899 (Volume 2), Fiona asked if she was correct in thinking that Macleay was soon to be married. Macleay answered that question affirmatively, and here Fiona sent good wishes for “his wedded life.” That fixes the date as 1899.
67 Sharp was stalling, through Fiona, for more time to comment substantively on the Rite as he had in his May 29 and June 5 letters to Yeats. Yeats sent separate copies of the Rite to Fiona and to Sharp for comment. Since he knew Sharp was writing the Fiona Macleod works under the influence of a woman he loved and since that woman was cooperating with Sharp in divining the rites for Yeats’ Celtic Order, the intended recipient of the second copy of the Rite must have been Edith Rinder. Following Sharp’s lead and because he did not know who she was, Yeats addressed her as Fiona Macleod.
68 Sharp stated that Fiona was in Midlothian from the “Middle Isles” in order to explain the Edinburgh postmark. Sharp drafted the letter in London and sent it to his sister in Edinburgh to copy and send. Yeats is to presume that Fiona will remain in Edinburgh for a week and Sharp will join her there on or about June 23. Subsequent letters confirm this supposed meeting and imply they went together back to the “Middle Isles” south and west of Glasgow where they remained until early July. It is likely that he was with Edith Rinder in the West.
69 The “Kritik” which was to appear soon, and its author, are unknown to me. “Dalua” is the first story in the first section of The Dominion of Dreams.
70 These square brackets appear in the original letter, and are not my own addition. am Fheill Bhrighde can be roughly translated into English as St. Bridgit or St. Bride.
71 Sharp’s handwritten draft of this letter is in the National Library of Scotland. Mary Sharp’s transcription, used here, is in the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
72 “The Book of the Opal” and “The Yellow Moonrock” appeared in The Dominion of Dreams (1899). AE’s letter to F. M. about the book contained some advice and some criticism as did his review in the Dublin Daily Express.
73 Sharp began “The Lily Leven” in 1896, but it was not published. See Endnote 24, Chapter 15 (Volume 2).
74 Yeats’s stories about Hanrahan the Red first appeared in The Secret Rose: A Collection of Stories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1897). They were published later as The Stories of Hanrahan the Red (Dundrum: The Dun Emer Press, 1904).
75 AE’s review of The Dominion of Dreams appeared in the Dublin Daily Express in June 1899.
76 The Athenaeum, 3738 (June, 1899), p. 751: “in some respects the most considerable work yet issued by the writer who has been for several years the protagonist of the Scottish Gael.”
77 Probably The House of Usna.
78 The letter is transcribed from Sharp’s draft for Mary to copy. It was written in response to the review of The Dominion of Dreams in the June 17 issue of The Athenaeum (see Endnote 75). I do not know if it was published.
79 Unwin published a revised edition of Yeats’s Poems in May, 1899. The postmark on this card is “Ju 19 9_.” The numeral after the second 9 is unclear. 20/6/98 has been written in pencil above the salutation. “Send,” appears in another hand in pencil above the message with a line going to “Complete Poems” in the body of the note. Since Sharp asked Unwin on April 18, 1899 when Yeats’ reissued Poems would be out and offered to do what he could for the book, June 19, 1899 is the probable date of the card.
80 The idea here is that Sharp would join Fiona in Edinburgh on the June 23 or 24, and they would go to the West together. Sharp’s mother’s house in Edinburgh was, before Miss Rea entered the picture, Fiona’s return address since Sharp’s sister Mary who provided the Fiona handwriting lived there with their mother. That was where Sharp stayed when he was in Edinburgh and where Fiona supposedly stayed with her aunt and cousins when she was in Edinburgh. Sharp could place her there only for brief time slots for fear someone would knock on the door looking for her.
81 Edward Verrall Lucas, The Open Road (1899). See Endnote 57.
82 This card was written and mailed on June 26 in Falkirk, near Stirling, when Sharp was traveling on the main line from Edinburgh to Glasgow and on to the west. He probably received Richard’s letter during his brief stop in Edinburgh.
83 This letter is transcribed from the draft in Sharp’s hand intended for Mary to copy into the Fiona hand. Sharp found the letter to Fiona from Rhys in Edinburgh when he stopped there on June 24/5. He must have drafted this response in the west and sent it to Mary from there. Letters in the Fiona hand usually carry the date of Sharp’s drafts.
84 Grace Rhys (née Little, 1865–1929) was an Irish writer raised in Boyle, County Roscommon. She met her husband at a garden party given by Yeats, and they married in 1891. Her first novel, Mary Dominic, was published in 1898. Her other work includes The Wooing of Sheila (1901), The Bride (1909), and Five Beads on a String (1907), a book of essays. She died in Washington, D. C. while accompanying her husband on an American lecture tour.
85 The phrase in brackets was crossed out.
86 F. E. Green included this letter in his column — “Book of the Week” — in The New Age, 4/13 (January, 1909). He concluded the article: “I may say that I was not actuated by mere literary curiosity in writing to Fiona Macleod; but by a genuine desire to find out more of the philosophy and religion underlying the spiritual romances which emanated from that wonderful pen” (267). I have dated the letter about June 30 because it places Fiona in the Highlands, where Sharp was located in late June and early July. Also in late June, The Dominion of Dreams had appeared recently, and Sharp still thought “The Reddening of the West” (which became The Divine Adventure) might be published in November 1899.
Chapter 19
1 Yeats’s review of Fiona Macleod’s The Dominion of Dreams appeared in the July issue of The Bookman. Sharp was in the west of Scotland when he received word from a “friend” about Yeats’s review so he had to wait a day for a copy of the July Bookman. He probably started this letter to Yeats on Monday, July 3, finished it on July 4, and held it until he received and read the Bookman review on July 5. He then decided not to send the letter because the review turned out to be less negative than he was led to believe. The ALS was recently acquired by the National Library of Scotland with a group of letters to John Macleay from William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. How the letter came into the group of Sharp letters to Macleay remains unknown. The most likely explanation is that it was preserved among Sharp’s own papers and E. A. S. sent it to Macleay by mistake when she returned the letters he received from Sharp/Macleod after using some in the Memoir. It certainly went to someone since it escaped Elizabeth’s burning of most of her husband’s papers before she died, and it was not among the few that were saved by E. A. S’s brother, Robert Farquharson Sharp, and donated to the National Library of Scotland by Robert’s son, Noel Farquharson Sharp.
2 The Saville Club was founded in 1868 by a group of like-minded young men who deplored the suffocating traditions of the traditional Victorian men’s clubs. In the 1870s, it established itself at 107 Piccadilly and eventually attracted many important literary figures, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Compton Mackenzie, Max Beerbohm and W. B. Yeats. The club outgrew its Piccadilly quarters in 1927 and moved to its current location, 69 Brook Street. The person most likely to have contacted Sharp about the Yeats review was Sharp’s publisher Grant Richards who knew his whereabouts and who knew he would be sensitive to any criticism of Fiona Macleod. Richards became a member of the Saville Club on March 24, 1899.
3 This article by AE (George Russell) appeared in the Dublin Daily Express on November 12, 1898. The paper had published an exchange of letters between John Eglinton and Yeats which AE had encouraged in order to draw attention to the Celtic cause. In this article, AE supported Yeats position that ancient legends can and should be used by contemporary writers. “Arguing that WBY sought to ennoble literature ‘by making it religious,’ he thought Eglinton simply unfamiliar with the symbolist tradition, and pointed out that since WBY’s aesthetic was governed by the mystical temper and his art ‘inspired by the Holy Breath,’ he was using his art for the ‘revelation of another world’ rather than ‘to depict this one’” (Collected Letters II, 293n). AE’s nationalistic linking of Celtic literature with Irish literature and his disavowal of “Pan-Celticism,” which emerged in this article and others, was offensive to Sharp because he saw it as devaluing the Scottish contributions, particularly those of Fiona Macleod, to the broader Celtic movement. The disagreement between AE and Sharp on this issue became more pronounced and more public in the months ahead.
4 This letter is not dated, but Richard Garnett retired from his position as Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum in 1899 and it was written when Sharp had just returned from Scotland. The Sharps permanently left their flat at 30 Greencroft Gardens on July 20, 1899.
5 I have not located an article by Sharp on Garnett.
6 This anthology never materialized. “The Hour of Beauty” is the title of a section of poems in the 1907 edition of Fiona Macleod’s From the Hills of Dream (Portland, Maine: Thomas Mosher).
7 Ireland/1899 is written in the top left corner in pencil not in Sharp’s hand. Internal evidence confirms that the letter was written on Tuesday July 11, 1899 when the Sharps were in London preparing to vacate their South Hampstead flat and go, via Scotland, to the east coast of Ireland for August and September. The two reviews of The Dominion of Dreams mentioned in the letter appeared in early July: The Outlook review, titled “Priestess of Beauty,” appeared in the issue of July 8 and Macleay’s review in The Highland News appeared the previous week.
8 This letter was written shortly before or after the Sharp’s left their South Hampstead flat on July 20, 1899 since its return address is that of Elizabeth Sharp’s mother where they spent some time before leaving London.
9 Printing this excerpt in the Memoir, E. A. S. identified Mrs. Janvier as the recipient.
10 Fairhead is a promontory on the North Coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland, five miles from Balleycastle.
11 W. Lawler Wilson was best known as the author of The Menace of Socialism which Grant Richards published in 1909. Sharp’s letter suggests Wilson asked for Sharp’s portrait and biographical information for his The Imperial Gallery of Portraiture: and Biographical Encyclopedia which was published in 1902. He also wrote The Lords and Liberty (1910) and co-authored with C. P. Yates The Will of the People (1910).
12 A photograph of Sharp appeared along with a review of Silence Farm in The Bookman (London: August, 1899).
13 This letter is reproduced from Le Gallienne’s The Romantic ’90s, where it is used as an example of the Fiona Macleod handwriting.
14 The middle portion of the letter is missing.
15 This review of F. M.’s book of stories, improbably titled “A Beautiful Novel,” appeared in The Publisher’s Circular, 1727 (August, 1899), 120.
16 This review by Baron De B.-W. appeared in Punch (August 2, 1899), 53.
17 The Divine Adventure was published in May, 1900.
18 According to E. A. S., this volume of plays, which did not materialize, was to be called The Theatre of the Soul or The Psychic Drama. “The King of Ireland’s Son” had become “The House of Usna” when it was performed “under the auspices of The Stage Society, of which William Sharp was the first Chairman” at the Fifth Meeting of the Society at the Globe Theatre, April 29, 1900 (Memoir, p. 317). “The House of Usna,” appeared in The National and English Review in July, 1900 (733ff) and as a separate publication by Thomas Mosher of Portland Maine, in 1903. “The Immortal Hour” appeared first in the Fortnightly Review of November 1900 (867–96). It was published as a book in the United States by Thomas Mosher (1907) and in England by T. N. Foulis (1908). The two plays are included in Poems and Dramas, Vol. VII of The Works of Fiona Macleod. “Queen Ganore” was not completed.
19 This reference indicates the letter was written from Ballycastle in County Antrim after August 20 and before August 26 when the Sharps had moved on to Newcastle in County Down.
20 Several words are impossible to decipher here.
21 This sentence suggests Sharp was intending to tell Edith Lyttelton about the crucial role his love affair with a beautiful young woman, perhaps calling her Fiona Macleod, played in his composition of the poems in Sospiri di Roma in the winter of 1891–1892.
22 Elizabeth Sharp said (Memoir, p. 35) this letter was written in 1899. Sharp’s birthday was September 12.
23 In a letter to Yeats dated 19 September, 1899, George Russell (AE) wrote in a postscript: “I saw Sharp last night on his way to England. No particular news of him. Mrs. Sharp with him.” Sharp must have drafted this letter while he and Elizabeth were in Ireland and sent it to Edinburgh for his sister to type, date, and send.
24 Cantyre is a peninsula at the southern part of Argyllshire between the Firth of Clyde and the Atlantic across the ocean from County Antrim in Northern Ireland.
25 After Sharp read Yeats’s review of Fiona’s Dominion of Dreams in the July Bookman, which contained a paragraph critical of the book, he (as Fiona) asked Yeats “to indicate the passages he took most exception to, and Mr. Yeats sent a carefully annotated copy of the book under discussion (Memoir, p. 309; see also Endnote 1). Yeats’s “welcome note of the third” must have accompanied the annotated copy of Fiona’s Dominion of Dreams.
26 This sentence exemplifies the conundrum Sharp created. In a letter to Yeats, William Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod, said her friend William Sharp had made some revisions in a book he wrote and published as the work of Fiona Macleod.
27 The Dominion of Dreams went through several reprintings, but there was no new edition until 1910, when it appeared in Vol. III of the Uniform Edition of The Works of “Fiona Macleod,” arranged by Mrs. William Sharp. There, according to E. A. S., it contained revisions a number of which were the outcome of Yeats’s suggestions. E. A. S. also moved stories in and out of the volume, “in accordance with the instructions and wishes of the author,” as she described in a “Biographical Note” (pp. 427–28).
28 This story appeared in The Dominion of Dreams and is discussed at some length in the introduction to this section of the letters as it relates to the elaborate metaphor Sharp constructed later in this letter to Yeats.
29 Here Sharp, as Fiona, suggests “The Divine Adventure” was written by “her” friend William Sharp, whose “heart is in the ancient world and his mind for ever questing in the domain of the spirit.” When the essay appeared in the November and December 1899 issues of the Fortnightly Review, it was the work of Fiona Macleod, and it became the titular essay of Fiona Macleod’s The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History which was published by Chapman and Hall in May 1900.
30 “Honey of the Wild Bees” appeared in The Dominion of Dreams. Drawing on the elaborate allegory in this letter of the match, torch, and flame — which is discussed in the “Life” section of this chapter — this sentence assigns principal responsibility to Sharp rather than Fiona for the stories in The Dominion of Dreams.
31 Regarding the plays, see Endnote 18.
32 Le Braz (1859–1926), often called the Bard of Brittany, was a was a Breton poet, folklore collector and translator. He was highly regarded amongst both European and American scholars, and known for his warmth and charm. His publications include Au pays des pardons (1894), Le Gardien du feu (l900), Essai sur l’histoire du Théatre Celtique (1904), Ames d’Occident (1911), and La Bretagne (1925).
33 Not completed.
34 St. Adamnan, Abbot of Hy (c. 624–704), wrote a Life of Saint Columba (Columb-Kille). A popular edition of Adamnan’s work entitled The Light of the West and edited by Dr. John Goodchild appeared in April, 1898. See letter to Dr. John Goodchild, [mid-May, 1898] (Volume 2).
35 The essay entitled “Iona” appeared first in the Fortnightly Review of March (507–23) and April (692–709) 1900. Later that year it was included in The Divine Adventure.
36 Library of Best Literature: Ancient and Modern (New York: R. S. Peele and J. A. Hill, 1898), edited by Charles Dudley Warner. Sharp contributed entries on the following topics: Celtic literature (with Ernest Rhys) to Vol. V; Maurice Maeterlinck to Vol. XVI; Henri Conscience to Vol. VII; Icelandic literature to Vol. XIV; Maarten Maartens to Vol. XVI; myths and folklore of Aryan People (with Ernest Rhys) to Vol. XVIII; Ossian (with Ernest Rhys) to Vol. XIX; and Hersart de la Villemarqué to vol. XXVI. The Kalevala is an epic poem compiled from Finnish and Karelian folklore by Elias Lönnrot in the nineteenth century.
37 Although added to the manuscript in pencil, presumably by the letter’s recipient or his secretary, the date is supported by internal evidence. Also added in pencil at the top of the first page in the same hand is the following statement: “T W. D rep Wm Sharp Letter — referring to The Luck of Vesprie Towers.”
38 The novel The Luck of Vesprie Towers did not appear until 1909 (London: John Lane). The New York Times review of the book, which appeared in the issue of May 20, 1909, begins as follows: “Amazement is perhaps the predominating sensation of the reader who turns the pages of the story ‘Vesprie Towers,’ the posthumous novel by Swinburne’s old friend and faithful comrade, Watts-Dunton. It seems incredible that such a book could be published in our day and hour. Nothing like it has seen the light since 1870 or thereabout, we feel sure. It is entirely of mid — or later (very little later) — Victorian times, the sort of tale our grandmothers would have read in Godey’s Lady’s Book with the most genteel approval and many maidenly thrills.” The poem Sharp praises is unknown, but it may have been intended for inclusion in the novel.
39 Benbecula is an island of the Outer Hebrides.
40 Elizabeth included a portion of this letter in the Memoir, p. 314.
41 Prior to this point the letter is typed. The rest is in the Fiona Macleod hand.
42 Grant Allen died on October 25, 1899, and his body was cremated at Woking two days later: “On Friday, 27 October, in pouring rain, the body was taken in a coffin of papier-mâché covered with white cloth to the Brookwood Crematorium, Woking. At the railway station it was met by Jerrard Allen, Grant Richards, Frank Whelan, J. S. Cotton, Rayner Storr, the Le Galliennes, and others. The only ceremony was a moving, simple and short memorial address by the positivist Frederic Harrison. It would, Harrison said rightly, be ‘an outrage on the life and last wishes of Grant Allen that any theological hopes or invocations should be uttered over his helpless body now resting in the sublime stillness of death’. Accordingly, none was offered. There was no music, the only sound coming from the roaring of the furnace nearby. His ashes were scattered in the garden of The Croft, his home in Hindhead” (Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), https://sites.google.com/site/petermortonswebsite/home/grant-allen-homepage/busiest-temp).
43 This letter was written on October 27, the day Grant Allen’s body was cremated.
44 The Boer War.
45 The Progress of Art in the Nineteenth Century (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, Ltd., 1902). This book also appeared in The Nineteenth Century Series edited by Justin McCarthy, et al. (Toronto and Philadelphia: The Linscott Publishing Co., 1902).
46 Sharp had in mind the book that would become The Divine Adventure: Iona; By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History, which was published by Chapman and Hall in May 1900.
47 This letter is postmarked November 7, which was a Tuesday.
48 Watts-Dunton, who was poetry editor of The Athenaeum, must have sent Sharp several books to review. That would explain his promise to get them safely back in due course, presumably after he wrote the reviews. I have found no record of Sharp publishing anything in The Athenaeum in late 1899 or 1900, though he might have a written one or more reviews published anonymously.
49 Literature, a weekly paper established in 1897 by The Times, was edited by Henry Duff Traill (1842–1900). Dalton must have edited a series, perhaps reviews of poetry, in the paper. Sharp was writing something for the series. He had published in Literature in July a poem, “The Ballad of the Ram,” and a story, “The Cafe of the Blind.”
50 Perhaps an edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence “Astrophel and Stella,” first published in 1591.
51 Probably Coulson Kernahan’s Scoundrels & Co. (1899), which Watts-Dunton sent Sharp to review.
52 George Scott Robertson (1852–1916) was a British physician, government agent, and author. He entered the Indian Medical service in 1898 and served through the Afghan campaign of 1879–1880. He was the British agent of Gilgit in Kashmir in 1888 and 1889. From 1890 to 1891 he lived amongst wild hill men in Kafiristan. He conducted a political mission to Chitral in 1893. During this mission, Chitral was besieged, and Robertson was severely wounded. He survived his wounds and was installed as ruler of Chitral in September of 1895. Among his publications are The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush (1896) and Chitral: The Story of a Minor Siege (1898).
53 We know Watts-Dunton loaned twenty-five pounds because on February 9, 1900 Sharp wrote a long letter to Watts-Dunton explaining ill health had intervened and made it impossible to repay the loan. He promised to repay it whenever he could get the money together.
54 The reference is to “The Divine Adventure,” which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in November and December.