Endnotes
Introduction
1 This Introduction is a slightly revised version of the Introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of The Life and Letters.
Chapter 20
1 In a November 1899 letter, Sharp asked Murray Gilchrist to be his guest at a dinner meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club (“the ‘Blue Ribbon’ […] of Literary Associations”) on Friday, December 1, 1899. Sharp was pleased to have been invited to compose a poem and read it at the dinner. In the poem, Sharp paid tribute to his friend Grant Allen who had recently died and had been a member of the club. In this letter to Allen’s widow, Sharp regrets that she did not receive a copy of the poem and sends another (Memoir, p. 313).
2 William Simpson (1823–1899) was an artist who worked for the Illustrated London News from 1860 to his death. Among his publications are the following works: The Campaign in the East; A Series of Views Illustrating the Crimean War (1885); Meeting the Sun: A Journey Around the World (1873); and The Buddhist Prayer Wheel (1896).
3 Edith Lyttelton (1865–1948) was interested in the writings of Fiona Macleod. Sharp had parlayed that interest into several meetings with her and tried with limited success to encourage her interest in what he wrote under his own name. A woman of many talents, Edith Lyttelton moved in the aristocratic circle of friends known as the “Souls”, which included A. J. Balfour, George Curzon, Margot Tennant (later Asquith), and Alfred Lyttelton, whom she married in April 1892 at Bordighera on the Italian Riviera. She served on the Executive Committee of the National Union of Women Workers (founded in 1895) and later as Chairwoman of the Personal Service Association (founded in 1908, to alleviate distress caused by unemployment in London). At the outbreak of World War, I she was a founder of the War Refugees Committee. She was appointed Deputy Director of the Women’s Branch of the Ministry of Agriculture in 1917, served on the Central Committee of Women’s Employment from 1916–1925, and as Vice-Chairman of the Waste Reclamation Trade Board from 1924–1931. She was also the British substitute delegate in Geneva to the League of Nations in 1923, 1926–1928, and 1931. After the death of her husband she became interested in spiritualism and was a member and President (1933–1934) of the council of the Society for Psychical Research. Her husband, Alfred Lyttelton (1857–1913), was a graduate of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge and one of the pre-eminent British sportsmen of his generation, the first man to represent England in both football and cricket. He was elected to parliament in 1895 and served as Secretary of State for the Colonies between 1903 and 1905. Following his death in 1913, his wife lived on for thirty-five years, receiving many honors from the crown. Wikipedia contributors, “Edith Balfour Lyttelton”, Wikipedia, 7 December 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Balfour_Lyttelton
4 Best known as a writer of romantic fiction, Maurice Hewlett (1861–1923) also wrote travelogues, essays, poetry, criticism, dramas, and a screenplay. His Little Novels of Italy was published by Methuen and Company in London in 1899. The book contains five short stories, set in Italy one of which is titled “Ippolita in the Hills.” Hewlett must have mentioned his dramatization of “Ippolita” to Sharp, who was a member of the Managing Committee of the Stage Society, in the hope the Society would produce it.
5 The reference must be to Paolo and Francesca, A Tragedy in Four Acts by Stephen Phillips (1868–1915) which was published by John Lane in London and New York in 1900.
6 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. Selected and edited with notes and introduction by Sidney Colvin. London: Methuen & Co., 1899.
7 The publication mentioned here is unknown, but later Edith Lyttelton published a biography of her husband (1917), a novel called The Sinclair Family (1926), and an account of her travels in the Far East and India, Travelling Days (1933). She also wrote seven plays and translated Edmond Rostand’s Les deux Pierrots (1891). After 1918 she lobbied for the foundation of a national theatre in London and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre. Spiritualism heavily influenced her later writings: The Faculty of Communion (1925), Our Superconscious Mind (1931), and Some Cases of Prediction (1937), as well her biography of Florence Upton (1926). Wikipedia contributors, “Edith Balfour Lyttelton”, Wikipedia, 7 December 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Balfour_Lyttelton
8 The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History was published by Chapman & Hall in May 1900.
9 The Progress of Art in the XIX Century was published as Vol. XXII of The Nineteenth Century Series, edited by Justin McCarthy et al. (Toronto and Philadelphia: The Linscott Publishing Co., 1902). It was published separately the same year in England by W. & R. Chambers, Ltd. of London and Edinburgh.
10 For information about Verschoyle, who was at this time Assistant Editor of The Fortnightly Review, see note to Sharp’s letter to him dated May 1 or 2, 1889 (Volume 1).
11 Date from postmark.
12 Mark Tapley is the body-servant to Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit in the novel of that name who remains consistently optimistic in the face of all adversities.
13 Date from postmark.
14 Broadstairs is a resort town on the coast in Kent where the Sharps spent three or four weeks in February and early March, having been ordered by their doctor to rest by the sea to recuperate from their illnesses.
15 Date from postmark. This card was sent to Verschoyle in Somerset where he was serving as a Rector. That address is crossed out and 51 New Bond Street, London is substituted.
16 The “Life” section of this chapter includes a discussion of the Stage Society and the Society’s production of Fiona Macleod’s “The House of Usna.”
17 Sir George Alexander (1858–1918) was an English actor and theatre manager. Born in Reading, he began acting in amateur theatricals in 1875 and made his London debut in 1881. In 1890, he produced his first play at the Avenue Theatre, and in 1891 he became the actor manager of the St James’s Theatre, where he produced several major plays of the day such as “Lady Windermere’s Fan” by Oscar Wilde (1892). He played Aubrey Tanqueray in the performance of Pinero’s “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray” (the St. James Theatre, London, on May 27, 1893) which made Mrs. Patrick Campbell into a theatrical star. In 1900, Alexander, who had acquired the acting rights for “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” visited Wilde in Paris and offered the poverty-stricken former writer some voluntary payments. He also arranged to bequeath the rights to Wilde’s plays to his estranged sons. Alexander remained at the St. James’s Theatre, producing and acting in plays, to the end of his life. Wikipedia contributors, “George Alexander (actor)”, Wikipedia, 14 March 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Alexander_(actor)
18 This is a fragment of a letter from Fiona Macleod to Ernest Rhys which he reproduced in an article entitled “William Sharp and ‘Fiona Macleod’” which appeared after Sharp’s death in The Century Magazine (May 1907, 111–17). Introducing the fragment, Rhys wrote “Of the many letters from his imaginary friend and collaborator which reached me from time to time, one at least may be quoted as confirming his own history of these neo-Celtic fantasies and romances.”
19 Lillian Rea, an American girl who assisted Sharp secretarially, had set up a Literary Agency in London which provided a return address for the Fiona letters. This avoided having letters, addressed to Fiona, pass through the hands of Mary Sharp in Edinburgh on their way to Sharp when he was in or near London. It is fitting that letters to Fiona Macleod would now be sent to the London address of Edith Rinder whom Sharp frequently conflated with the phantom Fiona.
20 At Sharp’s suggestion, Richards, in June 1899, asked Fiona to edit an anthology of poetry. The project never materialized.
21 Ernest Rhys’s “The New Mysticism” which appeared in The Fortnightly Review (June, 1900, 1045–56) and was later reprinted in The Bibelot, 8/11 (1902) published by T. B. Mosher in Portland, ME. It was a positive retrospective piece occasioned by the publication of Fiona Macleod’s The Divine Adventure.
22 The Divine Adventure.
23 I have not found a record of this novel’s publication.
24 “The House of Usna” was performed by the Stage Society at the Globe Theatre on April 29, 1900 and published in July, 1900, in The National Review, which was edited at the time by Leopold James Maxse (1864–1932).
25 The two Fiona articles appeared in the issues of The Fortnightly Review dated March 1 and April 11, 1900.
26 Fiona Macleod’s “Sea Magic and Running Water,” which appeared in The Contemporary Review in October 1902.
27 See the “Life” section of this chapter for a description of the public debate with George Russell (AE) occasioned by Fiona Macleod’s “Celtic” which was first published in the May 1900 issue of The Contemporary Review (Vol. 77, 669 ff.) and included in the “By Sundown Shores” section of The Divine Adventure which was published by Chapman & Hall in the same month. Later Sharp revised and enlarged the essay for separate publication in book form as Celtic: A Study in Spiritual History (Portland: T. B. Mosher, 1901). In 1904 Sharp included the revised version in the collection of essays entitled The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd.) In the 1910 Uniform Edition of Fiona Macleod’s works, it remained with The Winged Destiny in volume four. The alterations of “Celtic” in its several reprintings suggest Sharp considered it a significant statement of his ideas.
28 This Gaelic phrase is Sharp’s translation of the preceding statement.
29 Charles Charrington, a prominent actor/theater manager in London, was the second husband of Janet Achurch, a famous actress on the London stage in the 1890s whose most notable role was the heroine in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. The Charringtons popularized Ibsen not only in London but in Australia and elsewhere in the world. When Frederick Whelen (1867–1955) founded the Stage Society in July 1899 [see introduction to this section of letters], Charles Charrington was made a member of the Managing Committee which included, among others, William Sharp and Whelen as Chairman. Eventually Whelen and Charrington quarreled and parted ways. When Whelen became the Secretarial Manager in accord with Sharp’s proposal, Sharp became Chairman.
30 Ernest Williams (1866–1935) was a barrister and writer. Among his publications are Made in Germany (1896), The Tariff Dictionary (1904), An Exile in Bohemia (1902), The Philosophy of the Licensing Bill (1908), and The Temperance Handbook (1932).
31 O’Grady, Editor of the All Ireland Review, printed this letter on the front page of the paper’s August 4, 1890 issue.
32 William Archer (1856–1924) was an influential drama critic and translator of Ibsen. The date of the letter derives from the fact that August was the only month in 1900 in which the twenty-second fell on a Wednesday. Richards had published Sharp’s Silence Farm in June 1899, but the identity of the book at issue is unknown. A prominent member of London’s theater elite, Archer kept his distance from the Stage Society.
33 This letter to Yeats is discussed in the “Life” section of this chapter.
34 Since Yeats knew Sharp was the author of all that appeared as the writings of Fiona Macleod, we might wonder why Sharp positioned himself here as disagreeing with Fiona and Fiona, in turn, as sailing around the northern seas between Iceland and Norway. Although he told Yeats he was the author of the writings, he claimed that Fiona was a separate and independent female spirit speaking through him and that her presence was stimulated and nurtured by a truly separate woman who functioned as his Fiona muse. I doubt Edith Rinder was off sailing in the northern seas, but she may have been in the west of Scotland on annual holiday where, as in other years, Sharp would see her in September. Sharp and Edith were certainly together in London and its environs during October 1900. By emphasizing the distinction between Fiona and himself in this letter, Sharp also acknowledged the possibility that Yeats would share it with others.
35 AE’s letter in the August 18 issue of the All Ireland Review.
36 The manuscript letter is in Sharp’s hand for Mary Sharp to copy and send. On the back of the single sheet “Mr. Russell” is written in the Fiona handwriting which indicates Mary copied and sent it.
37 The letter to Rolleston has not surfaced, but it was written to thank him for his front-page article in the All Ireland Review of August 25 (“A.E. and Fiona Macleod”) in which he took Fiona’s side in the public debate with AE. A journalist and author, T. W. Rolleston (1857–1920) founded the Dublin University Review in 1885, served as First Hon. Secretary of the Irish Literary Society in London in 1892, and worked as Assistant Editor of the New Irish Library in 1893. From 1898 to 1900 he was the leader-writer for the Dublin Daily News, the Dublin Correspondent, and the Daily Chronicle. He was the Honorary Secretary of the Irish Arts and Crafts Society from 1898 to 1908. Among his publications are The Teaching of Epictetus (1888), The Life of Lessing (1889), A Treasury of Irish Poetry edited with Stopford Brook (1900), Imagination and Art in Gaelic Literature (1900), and Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911). Wikipedia contributors, “T. W. Rolleston”, Wikipedia, 31 May 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._W._Rolleston
38 See the “Life” section of this chapter for a discussion of this attempt to heal the breach with AE; his response; and Fiona’s October 20 response to him.
39 Sharp scrawled this letter on a blank sheet of paper folded in half. The carelessness of the script implies Sharp was ill. The letter is not dated, but most likely it was written in late 1900 after Verschoyle had been made Editor of the anti-vivisection journal The Abolitionist and when the Sharps were living out of London in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire since Sharp said he could not come in again (we presume him to mean London). For Verschoyle, see note to Sharp’s letter to him on May 1 or 2, 1889 (Volume 2).
40 Mona Caird wrote extensively in support of the anti-vivisection movement. In 1895, she published an essay titled “The Sanctuary Of Mercy” which reads in part: “Of this madness the present generation is guilty, since it allows learned professors, on the plea of doing good to our bodies, to ruin our souls; since it still permits a law to remain on the Statute Book which gives a license to physiologists to take a living, trembling creature — dog, cat, rabbit, frog — to tie it down on a board or trough, and there to cut it open and dissect its nerves and organs, pierce its brain with red-hot wire, etc […] And all this is done ostensibly in the interests of mankind! All this is done to make human existence pleasanter and more comfortable! Verily I think that vivisectors are doing their level best to make human life absolutely intolerable!” The section of the Crusade of Mercy (a religious organization) which Caird headed must have been the anti-vivisection section.
41 This letter is in Sharp’s hand for Mary Sharp to copy. On the reverse of the single page Sharp wrote Rolleston’s address (104 Pembroke Road | Dublin), (abt Carmichael | Review), and the date of the draft: 16 | Oct | 00.
42 Sharp expressed his praise for Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica in the Fiona essay “The Gael and His Heritage” which appeared in the November 1900 issue of The Nineteenth Century (48, 825–41). “The Carmina Gadelica is a collection of prayers, hymns, charms, incantations, blessings, runes, and other literary-folkloric poems and songs collected and translated by Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) in the Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland between 1855 and 1910. The work was originally published in six volumes, with extensive footnotes which contained further details as well as additional tales and folklore. Carmichael edited the first two volumes, published in 1900; volumes III and IV were edited by James Carmichael Watson (Alexander Carmichael’s grandson) and published in 1940 and 1941; two final volumes, edited by Angus Matheson, were published in 1954 and 1971. A one-volume, English-language edition was published in 1992. Initially highly praised as a monumental achievement in Scottish folklore, the Carmina Gadelica subsequently received criticism for Carmichael’s interpretation and presentation of the material. Criticism has ranged from the opinion that Carmichael was excessive in his editing of the source material to the accusation that some of his sources were fabricated. Some of his translations tend to sacrifice accuracy for a type of Victorian, anachronistic style which was popular at the time of the works’ first publication. In other cases it is clear, from comparing his notes to the finished product, that in some cases he may have invented additional lines and verses and incorporated them into the poems he had recorded, without acknowledging these changes. Despite the deficiencies, the Carmina remains an essential source in Scottish folklore. Wikipedia contributors, “Carmina Gadelica”, Wikipedia, 5 May 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Gadelica
43 The manuscript is in Sharp’s hand for Mary to copy. It was originally dated the 10th, and the 10 has been changed to a 20, an indication that Sharp wrote the draft on the 10th, and Mary mailed her transcription on the 20th.
44 “The Immortal Hour” appeared in the November 1890 Fortnightly, and the essay in the November 1890 Nineteenth Century.
45 AE had enclosed a spray of heather as a token of friendship and reconciliation in the letter to which Fiona was responding.
46 See Endnote 20 and Endnote 47.
47 In response to Fiona’s letter dated October 20, Richards told her to take her time with the anthology. Curiously, the card is dated October 31 from Paris, but its Paris postmark is October 13, 1900. In her October 20 letter, Fiona told Richards she had arrived in London two days before and was leaving the next day “probably for Tangiers.” It was important to get her out of town quickly. When Sharp received Richards’ reply, from Edinburgh in early November, he instructed his sister to date Fiona’s reply October 31, and he subsequently mailed it from Paris on his way to the south of France. He left England on November 12 so the October 13 postmark on the card must be a mistake for November 13.
48 Fiona Macleod’s drama “The Immortal Hour” was published complete in the November issue of The Fortnightly Review. Richards liked the suggestion in her October 20 letter that he publish a book of her poems which would include as its titular piece “The Immortal Hour” and selected poems from her 1896 volume of poetry, From the Hills of Dream. The volume never appeared.
49 E. A. S said this letter was written in early October, but early November is more likely. Other evidence indicates the Sharps were in London through October and, according to this letter, left for France on 12 November.
50 I am unable to identify this play by Hardy. His The Three Wayfarers: A Pastoral Play in One Act (New York: Harper, 1893) was produced by the Stage Society in 1902.
51 Stevenson, R. L and W. E. Henley’s Robert Macaire: A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1885).
52 Educated at Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Bonn, George Prothero (1848–1922) held the chair of modern history at Edinburgh University until in 1899 he moved to London to become Editor of the Quarterly Review, a position of considerable prominence and power. He was President of the Royal Historical Society from 1901 to 1905, and he was knighted in 1920. As an act of generosity, Watts-Dunton told his friend Prothero that Sharp was going to Provence and suggested he commission him to write an article for the Quarterly Review on Provencal writers. Watts-Dunton’s motive was to obtain for Sharp an advance that would provide some financial relief. Sharp’s article, “Modern Troubadours,” was completed in December 1900, but it did not appear in the Quarterly until October 1901.
53 Sharp must have drafted this letter before he left London and sent it to his sister to copy, date, and send from Edinburgh. Goodchild would not have been aware she was supposed to be in France or points farther south.
54 Sharp wrote this letter in his role as Chairman of the Stage Society. See Sharp’s July 6, 1900 letter to Frederick Charles Charrington and footnote.
55 E. A. S included portions of this letter in the Memoir, pp. 325–26.
56 Sharp’s Progress of Art in the XIX Century. See Endnote 9.
57 See Endnote 42.
58 “The Gael and his Heritage”.
59 Andrew Carmichael.
60 Sharp’s “Modern Troubadours” appeared in the Quarterly Review in October 1901.
61 Neil Munro (1864–1930) was a novelist, poet, and historian. Among his publications are the above-mentioned Doom Castle (New York: Doubleday, 1900), Fancy Farm (1910), The Poetry of Neil Munro (1931), and Children of Tempest (1935).
Chapter 21
1 In 1927, the town’s name reverted to Enna, its former name, which is derived from the Seculian Henna. Enna is the legendary scene of the rape of Persephone and the center of the cult of her mother, Ceres or Demeter. It is the chief town of Enna Province and the most interesting inland town in Sicily for its historical significance, beautiful location, impressive churches, and other historical buildings, most of which survived the bombing during World War II.
2 This letter was written on the Duke of Bronte’s stationery: a crown and “Bronte | Sicily” are printed at the top center of the first sheet. Sharp wrote the letter at the Duke’s Castello Maniace shortly before returning to Taormina.
3 Based in Leipzig, Baron Tauchnitz published German editions of selected writings of British and American authors, as well as introductory essays. These editions were intended primarily for English-speaking readers living in Germany, non-English-speaking countries and for others whose native language was not English but who wanted to read the works in English rather than in translation. Swinburne did consent to the volume, which was published in early October 1901 as Selections of Poems by A. C. Swinburne, selected and arranged and with an introduction by William Sharp (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1901). Wikipedia contributors, “Tauchnitz Publishers”, Wikipedia, 27 April 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tauchnitz_publishers
4 Queen Victoria died on 22 January 1901.
5 Born in Dublin, Samuel Henry Butcher (1850–1910) was a classical scholar whose many publications included, a prose translation, in collaboration with Dr Andrew Lang, of Homer’s Odyssey (1879). Butcher was one of the two Members of Parliament for Cambridge University between 1906 and his death.
6 This was the first of several visits by the Sharps to the Castle Maniace, the Viscount Bridport’s residence on his large estate on the western slopes of Mount Etna. Sharp died there on December 12, 1905, and he is buried on the grounds under a Celtic cross. See the “Life” section of this chapter for more information about the Duke and the Duchy of Bronte.
7 In his early February letter to Watts-Dunton, Sharp implied they visited Syracuse on Sicily’s southeast coast on their way from Palermo to Taormina. If E. A. S.’s dating of this letter is correct, the Sharps traveled from Taormina to Syracuse and back to Taormina in early February.
8 David Alexander Munro (1844–1910) was born in Scotland, graduated from Edinburgh University in 1872, and settled in New York where he pursued the study of Greek literature and worked for many years as a Literary Editor at Harpers Brothers. He became Manager of The North American Review in 1889, Editor in 1896, and Assistant Editor in 1899 when the Review was bought and edited by Colonel George Harvey. Munro often contributed articles to the New York Times and was highly respected for his writing and for the warmth of his personality in New York literary circles of the Gilded Age.
9 “The Irish Muse” was an article occasioned by the publication of A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue edited by Stopford Brooke and T. W. Rolleston with a lengthy introduction by Brooke (Macmillan: London and New York, 1900). Fiona Macleod’s article did not appear in The North American Review until the issues of November and December 1904. In October 1902, however, the latter periodical published Fiona Macleod’s “The Later Work of W. B. Yeats.”
10 This letter is transcribed from the draft written by Sharp and dated March 16th in Florence. The 16th is crossed through and “18th March” is substituted in the Fiona Macleod handwriting of Mary Sharp. E. A. S. printed portions of the letter in her Memoir (pp. 331–32). Gertrude Eliza Page (1872–1922) became a popular writer of light dramatic novels. She married in 1902, and two years later the couple moved to Rhodesia where they eventually bought land and developed a prosperous ranch. After writing five novels that found no publisher, her sixth, Love in the Wilderness, was published in 1907. Seventeen more novels, some written before 1907 others set in Rhodesia, appeared in the next fifteen years. Her most successful novel was written shortly after her marriage and set in her husband’s native Armagh, Northern Ireland. Titled Paddy the Next Best Thing, it was published in 1908 and sold over 300,000 copies. It was transformed first into a long running play at London’s Savoy Theater and then into a successful movie starring Janet Gaynor as Paddy. In her teens, Gertrude Page filled her stories with long words and longer sentences, but later she developed an easy narrative style. Sharp’s overblown response to her fan letter suggests that her style and sensibility had not been pared by that date. Although the letter is addressed to an “unknown friend,” Gertrude Page included in her letter to Fiona her name and return address, which Sharp reproduced as mailing instructions to Mary Sharp at the top of his draft. He had no idea who Gertrude Page was in 1900, but Elizabeth must have known who she was when she wrote the Memoir. Her keeping the “unknown friend” salutation may have been to avoid invasion of privacy.
11 Chatto & Windus Ltd. was Swinburne’s publisher in England. See Endnote 3 regarding the editing of the Tauchnitz edition of Swinburne’s poems.
12 Sharp is referring to an article on Watts-Dunton’s poetry and prose he proposed to the Editor of Literature. See Endnote 13.
13 In late April or early May, Sharp proposed an article on the poetry and prose of Watts-Dunton to the Editor of the weekly magazine Literature. Here he recounts how the periodical’s Editor had responded positively but restricted its size. Sharp completed and submitted the article, but it never appeared. See Endnote 19.
14 “June 1, 1901” is written at the top right of the first typed page in a script that does not belong to Fiona but may be that of Edith Rinder. June 1 was a Saturday so the letter was typed on Friday, May 31 and mailed on the first.
15 In September 1901, Thomas Mosher published Fiona Macleod’s From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs, and Other Poems (Portland, ME) in his Old World Series. It differed from the first edition published by Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh in 1896. During a visit to Edinburgh, Mosher gained Patrick Geddes’ approval to publish an edition of the poems in America. The differences made a U. S. copyright possible.
16 Someone, perhaps Mosher, wrote at the bottom of the last sheet “1/2 on re’d MS. | 1/2 on book being pld.”
17 This note acknowledged payment for “The Later Work of W. B. Yeats” which appeared in The North American Review in October 1902 (pp. 473–85). It was included later as “The Shadowy Waters” in Fiona’s The Winged Destiny, Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904). See Endnote 8.
18 The Queen and Other Poems (London and New York: John Lane, 1901).
19 See Endnote 13. Sharp’s “Traill I see is back” is ironic in that H. D. Traill, formerly the Editor of Literature, had died on February 20, 1900. The current Editor of Literature must have replied to Sharp’s complaint about the restrictions with a note on Traill’s left-over stationery or a form letter from the dead Traill. This exchange signals the confusion that descended on Literature following Traill’s death and prior to its imminent marriage with the Academy. The article which Sharp wrote and submitted to Literature on Watts-Dunton’s poetry and prose was never published. In the fall of 1901, Sharp wrote another article titled “A Literary Friendship: Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton at the Pines” which was published in the December 1901 issue of the Pall Mall Magazine.
20 See the “Life” section of this chapter which tells the story behind the return address and the physical form of this and succeeding letters.
21 This letter transmits the copy of From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs, and Other Poems which Thomas Mosher published in his Old World Series in September 1901.
22 This letter was produced on the same typewriter used for other typed Fiona letters of this period. Unlike the others, it is single-spaced and somewhat sloppy in punctuation and other details, indicating another typist other than the meticulous Mary.
23 Mosher published an edition of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies in 1900.
24 The friend was Sharp who, as both himself and Fiona, was helping Yeats in the composition of rites for his Celtic Mystical Order. See the “Life” section of this chapter which provides some context for the exchange of letters between Yeats and Sharp/Macleod about the Celtic Order during the summer and fall of 1901. A much fuller discussion may be found in Collected Letters IV, pp. 967–69, 974–80, and 982–84. Coincidentally, the date of this Fiona Macleod letter, July 26, was the day Edith Rinder gave birth to a baby girl, her only child, Esther Mona Rinder (later Harvey).
25 According to Sharp’s July 30 letter to Dowden, he and Elizabeth spent July on a Moor-Farm in Derbyshire. Chesterfield is near Sheffield, which is near Cartledge Hall, the home of Sharp’s friend Murray Gilchrist who knew Sharp was Fiona Macleod. So Sharp was on hand to take care of any Fiona correspondence that came to Cartledge Hall. Fiona letters in late July and August have return addresses first in the West of Scotland where Mary vacationed with her mother and then their Edinburgh home.
26 Sharp’s article entitled “Modern Troubadours” appeared in the October 1901 issue of the Quarterly Review (Number 387).
27 A residential suburb on the coast south of Dublin.
28 The Sharps were in Derbyshire and planned to leave for Scotland on Sunday or Monday, August 4 or 5. Sharp had been working there on the article on Swinburne and Watts-Dunton which appeared in the Pall Mall Magazine in December 1901. See Endnote 19. He had sent the manuscript to Watts-Dunton for him to review. and here he urged him to conclude his review so the article could go to George L. Halkett, the Editor of the Pall Mall Magazine. Born the same year, Halkett (1855–1918) and Sharp were boyhood friends in Glasgow. He studied art and became a well-known cartoonist. He joined the Pall Mall Gazette in 1892 as political cartoonist and writer on art. In 1897, he became art editor and then, in 1900, Editor. Over the next few years, the Halkett published several articles written by Sharp about the home locations of famous writers. A welcome source of income, they were collected and published by the Pall Mall Press in 1904 in a volume called Literary Geography which Sharp dedicated to Halkett.
29 Watts-Dunton was Literary Editor of the Athenaeum between 1876 and 1898. I have not been able to identify the Editor in 1901 or the volume of poems referred to here. It may have been a book by Watts-Dunton called A Christmas Dream which was published in December 1901, but I have not been able to obtain either a copy of that book or a description of its contents. When he published The Coming of Love, a volume of poems, in 1897, Thomas Watts added his mother’s maiden name, Dunton, to Watts and was thereafter known as Thomas Watts-Dunton. Those poems dealt with the lives of the Gypsies he had known in his youth in the west of England and Wales, as did his successful novel, Alwyn, first published in 1898.
30 This letter is entirely in Mary’s Fiona Macleod handwriting, which suggests she preceded the Sharps to Kilcreggan, received Sharp’s draft there, transcribed it, and mailed it before the Sharps’ arrival on August 10 or 11.
31 Sharp expected Edith Rinder to return to her secretarial role when Sharp returned to London in October. That would have been convenient for him, but it did not occur at once.
32 Dante Gabrielle Rossetti’s The Blessed Damazel and Marcel Schwob’s Mimes were published in separate small volumes by Thomas Mosher in Portland, ME, in 1901. Mimes was translated from the French by A. Lenalie.
33 Fiona’s “Celtic” appeared in The Bibelot, 7 (November, 1901), 351–84.
34 Here the letter shifts from the Fiona Macleod script to typescript. The five paragraphs following are typed, and the rest is in the Macleod script.
35 Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1900).
36 The December issue of Mosher’s Bibelot in 1900 contained “Lyrics from the Hills of Dream,” a selection of poems from Fiona’s From the Hills of Dream published in Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues in 1896.
37 A group of poems entitled “Through the Ivory Gate” appeared in The Fortnightly Review, 70 (October 1, 1901), 720–24.
38 “For the Beauty of an Idea” became not a narrative, but the title of a group of essays on the Celtic Movement in Fiona Macleod’s The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd.) 1904.
39 Fiona’s “Celtic” appeared in The Bibelot, 7 (November, 1901), 351–84.
40 Walter Pater’s Essays from “The Guardian,” (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1897).
41 Selections of Poems by A. C. Swinburne, arranged by William Sharp (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1901). Swinburne’s response to this letter (Memoir, pp. 336–37), dated October 6, 1901, takes issue with some of Sharp’s selections.
42 Born in 1836, Henry Alden was appointed Editor of Harper’s Weekly, later Harper’s Magazine, in 1869 and held that influential position for more than forty years. Sharp met Alden, his wife, the former Susan Foster, and their three daughters during his visits to New York in 1889 and 1891. The first Mrs. Alden died after a long and debilitating illness in the early summer of 1895. During his visit to New York in the fall of 1896, Sharp stayed with Alden at his home across the Hudson in Metuchen, New Jersey. While there, he told Alden, who was twenty years his senior and who knew he was the author of the Fiona writings, about his ongoing relationship with Edith Rinder. The “fantastically strange” and “deeply moving development” of “that old romance of boyhood” was the birth of Edith’s baby girl on July 26.
43 Mosher published Robert Louis Stevenson’s Francois Villon: Student, Poet, and Housebreaker in 1901.
44 “Leonardo da Vinci” and “The School of Giorgione” first appeared in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan and Company, 1873). Greek Studies (London and New York: Macmillan and Company) was first published in 1895. The book Mosher sent to Fiona Macleod is Pater’s Essays from the Guardian (1897); Mosher had also published Pater’s Marius the Epicurean in 1900.
45 The series of poems entitled “Through the Ivory Gate” appeared in the October 1, 1901 edition of The Fortnightly Review.
46 The “present 10th” poem was entitled “Requiem” in the Mosher editions of From the Hills of Dream (1901 and 1904). In the next English edition of From the Hills of Dream (London: Heinemann, 1907) which was prepared by E. A. S. after Sharp’s death according to his instructions, the poem is entitled “Murias.” It is the fifth and last poem in the series called “The Dirge of the Four Cities.” Sharp prefaced that series with the following quotation from The Little Book of Great Enchantment, though no such book has been found: “There are four cities that no mortal eye has seen but that the soul knows; these are Gorias, that is in the east; and Finias, that is in the south; and Murias, that is in the west; and Falias, that is in the north. And the symbol of Falia is the stone of death, which is crowned with pale fire. And the symbol of Gorias is the dividing sword. And the symbol of Finias is a spear. And the symbol of Murias is a hollow that is filled with water and fading light.” Yeats identified these as the four cities from which the divine race, the Tuath De Danaan, came to Ireland. The Fiona poem portrays Murias as a “sunken city” where a golden image dwells beneath the waves. The four cities and their four symbols were key features of the Rites constructed by Yeats for his Celtic Mystical Order, and they have their roots in ancient Gaelic mythology.
47 The Mosher edition of from the From the Hills of Dream did not include Fiona’s poetic drama, “The Immortal Hour,” but Sharp planned to include it in the new English edition of the book which did not materialize.
48 The reference is to a lengthy dedicatory note, “To W. B. Yeats,” which precedes the section of the volume entitled “Foam of the Past.”
49 On the verso of this single-page letter, Yeats made notes dealing with the Celtic Mysteries. There is a list of six numbered items as follows: 1. spear — [illegible] | 2. sword. [illegible] | I become sword. | 3. [illegible] | 4. fasin[?] — [illegible] | 5. flight over [moon?] — [illegible] & long life | a long [illegible] | 6. flight under water — net
50 Celtic: A Study in Spiritual History (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1901).
51 Sections of this letter were published by Mrs. Sharp in the Memoir, p. 333. She used Sharp’s original draft, and she dates the letter November 12, 1901. The present transcription has been made from the undated manuscript in the Fiona Macleod handwriting which was sent to Mosher.
52 The Silence of Amor (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1902).
53 The House of Usna: A Drama (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1903). The brackets are in the manuscript letter.
54 Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), a popular American writer, was the only son of the American sculptor Thomas Crawford and Louisa Cutler Ward and the nephew of the American poet Julia Ward Howe. He was the author of forty-six romantic novels, over half set in Italy, and seven books of non-fiction. Following their marriage in 1884, he and his wife (the former Elizabeth Berdan) settled in Italy where they purchased a substantial house in Sant’ Agnello, near Sorrento, which they named the Villa Crawford and where they entertained many well-known and well-connected American and British guests. That house was their principal place of residence until his death twenty-five years and many novels later. It has recently been beautifully restored and renamed the Hotel Crawford. Wikipedia contributors, “Francis Marion Crawford,” Wikipedia, 10 July 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Marion_Crawford
55 Alexander Nelson Hood (1854–1937) was the son of Alexander Hood, 1st Viscount Bridport and Lady Mary Penelope, daughter of Arthur Hill, 3rd Marquess of Downshire. While Hood’s eldest brother Arthur Hood succeeded their father as 2nd Viscount Bridport, the Duchy of Bronté was left to Alexander who became the 5th Duke of Bronté. This was possible because of a special and unusual clause in the letters patent granting the duchy, which allowed the present holder of the title to choose his successor. He served as Controller of the Household and Equerry to Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge between 1892 and 1897 and was an Extra Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chambers to Queen Victoria from 1892 to 1901. He was Private Secretary to Mary of Teck as Princess of Wales from 1901 to 1910, and was then her Treasurer as Queen between 1910 and 1919. He was invested as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order. He died at Taormina, Sicily. Information from Wikipedia contributors, “Alexander Hood, 5th Duke of Bronte,” Wikipedia, 17 August 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Alexander_Nelson_Hood and from Michael Pratt’s Nelson’s Duchy, A Sicilian Anomaly (Staplehurst: Spellmount Limited, 2005).
56 The Mosher edition of From the Hills of Dream which contained the dedication to Yeats.
57 According to Elizabeth Sharp, this letter was “ostensibly” written in Argyll (Memoir, p. 337).
58 Buchanan’s The Book of Orm (London: Chatto and Windus, 1882). Mosher did not publish this book.
59 Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems was published in London by Chatto and Windus in 1882 and then by Mosher, without the “Prelude,” in 1904.
60 Gerard de Nerval (1808–1855), known also as Gerard Labrunie, was a leader of the French Romantic Movement of 1830. Among his works are Sylvie (1853); Le Reve et la Vie (1855); and Les Illumines (1852).
61 Sharp must have received the photograph of Fiona Macleod, which he had sent on loan, from Mosher during the two or three days prior. The photograph which he had shown to others claiming she was Fiona was probably that of Edith Rinder.
62 Mrs. J. H. Philpot was the author of The Sacred Tree or the Tree in Religion and Myth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897).
Chapter 22
1 This poem was reproduced by E. A. S.in her Memoir, but she did not include it in Poems by William Sharp, Selected and Arranged by Mrs. William Sharp (London: William Heinemann, 1912).
2 In a postcard dated 11 November 1901, Fiona thanked Mosher for 12 copies of the issue of his Bibelot that contained her Celtic essay and expressed her hope of soon receiving the “special copies” which he had promised. These were the copies on “Japan Vellum” for which she thanked him here.
3 Sharp probably sent this letter for Mary to copy and send before he left England on December 3, 1901 to be near his friend Doctor John Goodchild on the French Riviera. Goodchild was spending the winter caring for his English patients, in a resort town a few miles west of Bordighera.
4 In a letter dated 12 December 1901, Fiona thanked Mosher for sending her his photograph and continued: “I hope that which I sent you (as I explained — reluctantly — necessarily only a loan, and even thus on certain conditions) duly reached you.” Sharp, writing as Fiona, sent Mosher a photograph of Edith Rinder, claiming it to be a picture of herself, and said she expected him to return it. In a letter dated 15 December 1901, Fiona had already thanked Mosher for returning it and refused, reluctantly, his request to publish it.
5 The Sharps had been staying with Alexander Nelson Hood at Maniace since early February.
6 San Pancrazio, Saint Pancras in English, was a Roman citizen who converted to Christianity and was beheaded for his faith at the age of fourteen in about 304 A. D. He is popularly venerated as the patron saint of children, jobs and health. Pope Gregory the Great (540–604 A. D.) sent Augustine to London with relics of the saint, and many English churches are dedicated to him. including St Pancras Old Church in London, one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England. Some members of the cult of San Pancrazio believed he had seen Christ in the flesh. Wikipedia contributors, “Pancras of Rome,” Wikipedia, 13 May 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancras_of_Rome
7 Gelon came to power in Eastern Sicily in 491 B. C. and ruled Syracuse from 485 to 478 B. C. He was succeeded by his brother Hieron who ruled from 478 to 467 B. C. Dionysius the Elder ruled Syracuse from 405–367 B. C.
8 Sharp’s “Italian Poets of Today” appeared in the Quarterly Review in July 1902, 239–68.
9 The Kôrê of Enna was not completed.
10 Catherine Janvier’s Captain Dionysius was finally published in 1935 (Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co. Inc.).
11 Mrs. J. H. Philpot was the author of The Sacred Tree or The Tree in Religion and Myth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897).
12 Easter Sunday was on 30 March 1902.
13 The letter is typed to this point. What follows is written in the Fiona Macleod hand.
14 According to E. A. S., this letter was written to the nephew of William Black (1841–1898), a popular novelist who was born in Glasgow in 1841 and died in Brighton in 1898. In his early twenties, he obtained a post in London working on the Morning Star and soon began writing novels. Following several failures, he achieved great popular success with A Daughter of Heth in 1871. This led to a long string of popular novels, including The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton (1872); A Princess of Thule (1874); Madcap Violet (1876); Macleod of Dare (1878); White Wings (1880); Sunrise (1880); Shandon Bells (1883); Judith Shakespeare (5884); White Heather (1885); Donald Ross of Heimra 1891); Highland Cousins (1894); and Wild Eelin (1898). A thoroughgoing sportsman, Black’s best works are set amid the mountains of his native land or on the deck of a yacht off its wild coast. His descriptions of scenery are simple and picturesque. Though Black was fourteen years Sharp’s senior, the two men must have known each other. Fiona’s advice to Black’s nephew (whom Sharp felt was imitating her style too closely) to strive for simplicity was motivated by his desire to be helpful to a relative of a recently deceased friend. However, the caution against mannerisms and affectation resembles the advice Sharp’s Fiona received from W. B. Yeats in reviewing her Dominion of Dreams in 1899.
15 The only clue as to the date of this undated fragment to an unknown friend is E. A. S. placing it immediately after the Fiona Macleod letter to William Black’s nephew.
16 The letter is typed to this point. The remainder is written in the Fiona hand which implies that it was typed, signed and mailed by Mary Sharp in Edinburgh. Given the return address, Sharp was most likely in London at the time.
17 Alfred Austin (1835–1913) was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896 and served in that post until his death. Born in Leeds and educated at the University of London, he was called to the bar in 1857 and served briefly as a barrister before turning full time to poetry. His poetic output was considerable in quantity but lacking in quality. The context of the request for assistance in this letter is described in the “Life” section of this chapter.
18 Marcel Schwob, Mimes with a Prologue and Epilogue, translated into English by A. Lenalie (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher’s Miscellaneous Series, 1901).
19 The earlier sections are typed; the remainder is in Mary Sharp’s Fiona Macleod handwriting.
20 This letter was written one day prior to the coronation of King Edward VII on August 9, 1902.
21 Grant Richards published Richard Whiteing’s popular novel No. 5 John Street in 1899.
22 See the “Life” section of this chapter for a description, based largely on these letters to Austin and Hood, of the failed effort to have Sharp placed on the Civil Pension List.
23 Ernest Renan’s “Priere sur l’Acropole” first appeared in Revue de Deux Mondes (December 1, 1876), 483–507. The French translates “There is nothing in the world but symbol and dream. The two pass as man does and it would not be good if they were everlasting.”
24 At this point Mrs. Sharp inserted the following in brackets: “‘Julian’ is the name of the hero of a book, Adria, on which Mr. Hood was then at work.” Hood’s Adria: A Tale of Venice was published by John Murray (London) in 1904. As printed in the Memoir, the paragraph makes no sense. There are three Julians: Sharp, Hood, and the character in Hood’s novel. Elizabeth must have omitted some words in her transcription of the letter, or perhaps the typesetter was at fault.
25 Sharp completed the first section of the proposed book which appeared in The Monthly Review as “The Magic Kingdoms,” in January 1903 (100–12). Tauchnitz in Leipzig published a Fiona Macleod book entitled Wind and Wave in 1902.
26 Mrs. Sharp states in the Memoir (p. 348) that in early September 1902, Mr. Hood informed Sharp that the Prime Minister had decided “on the strength of the assurance that Mr. Sharp is Fiona Macleod” to present him with a grant that would meet his needs and allow him to go abroad for the winter.
27 George Hutchinson (1852–1942) was an English book publisher who founded Hutchinson & Co. in 1887.
28 The body of the letter is typed over the scripted signature and postscript which are in Mary’s Fiona hand.
29 Santa Caterina, formally a convent, was the winter home of Sir Edward Hill who offered its small chapel for Anglican services. He later purchased land and contributed substantially to the construction of Taormina’s Anglican church, St. George’s, which was designed by Sir Henry Triggs — a British architect and Sir Edward’s son-in-law — and completed in 1922. Mabel Hill, Sir Edward’s daughter, welcomed the Sharps to the villa where they would stay until the New Year. Mabel Hill became a major benefactress of Taormina where a street is named after her.
30 “The Magic Kingdoms” appeared in the January l903 issue of The Monthly Review; “The Lynn of Dreams” in the December 1902 issue of The Contemporary Review; and “The Four Winds of Eirinn” in the February 1903 issue of The Fortnightly Review.
31 The rather confusing publishing history of the works mentioned in this paragraph may be untangled in the Bibliographical Notes in The Winged Destiny | Studies in the Spiritual History of “The Gael,” Volume V of The Works of Fiona Macleod, arranged by Mrs. William Sharp (London and New York: Heinemann, 1910).
32 Thomas Janvier’s story appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1902 and in his Stories from the South of France (London: Harper Brother, 1912).
33 By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher’s Brocade Series, September 1902).
34 Richard Jefferies, Nature and Eternity with other Uncollected Papers (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher’s Brocade Series, August, 1902); and Irma Ann Heath, Immense, translated from German by Theodore Storm (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher’s Brocade Series, October 1902).
35 “The Later Work of W. B. Yeats” appeared in The North American Review, 175 (October 1902), 473–85.
36 Elizabeth had recently returned to Taormina from Maniace.
37 In June, Macleay told Sharp he wanted to write an article about him and asked Sharp to tell him about any events or accomplishments he would like mentioned. In a letter to MacLeay dated June 23, Sharp refrained from writing anything about himself other than he had spent much of his life “wandering.” Perhaps when they met he could say more. They subsequently meet in Inverness in early August, and Sharp must have spoken enough about himself for MacLeay to produce the article. He sent Sharp a copy to review. With this letter, apologizing for his delay, Sharp returned the manuscript with only a few comments and expressed his pleasure with it. In the bibliography of the second and final volume of the Memoir, Elizabeth stated that an article entitled “A Literary Wanderer: The Career of William Sharp” was published in April 1903 in The Young Man. Unable to find that publication, I have not seen the article, but its title suggests it was written by John Macleay.
38 Hood was in Venice to collect information for a romance he was writing which was to be set at the time of the Austrian occupation of the city in the early nineteenth century. When the romance was published as Adria: A Tale of Venice in 1904, it was dedicated to William Sharp. See the “Life” section of this chapter.
Chapter 23
1 Walter Pater, Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1902).
2 Mrs. Sharp states in the Memoir (p. 362): “William Sharp started for a fortnight’s trip to Greece by way of Calabria-Reggio, Crotona, Taranto, Brindisi to Corfu and Athens, with a view of gathering impressions for the working out of his projected book (by W. S.) to be called Greek Backgrounds.” Reggio de Calabria (or simply Reggio) is the largest city and the most populated commune of Calabria. It lies at the western point of the toe of Italy’s boot, across the strait from Messina in Sicily. From there, Sharp traveled by land to Crotone, the largest city on the east side of the toe, where he boarded a ferry to the port city of Taranto on the west side of the heel of Italy’s boot. He then took a train called the Agamemnon to Brindisi, a port city on the east of the heel and, from there, a ship (the Poseidon) which crossed the Ionian Sea to the shore of Albania where the couple docked at Eavri Kagavri, a Greco-Albanian township of Turkey.
3 Henry David Davray (1873–1944) wrote and translated for the Mercury de France and was the author of Chez les Anglia’s Pendant la Grande Guerre (1916); Through French Eyes (1916); and Lord Kitchener: His Work and His Prestige (1917). There is no record of his having published a translation of Fiona Macleod writings.
4 Unable to identify.
5 Arnold Cervesato (1872–1944) was the author of The Roman Campagna (1913) and Allegretto Ma Non Troppo (1939).
6 Wind and Wave: Selected Tales (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1902).
7 “The Sunset of Old Tales” appeared in The Fortnightly Review in June 1893 (73, 1087–1110) and both as an essay and as the title of a section, in The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904).
8 The following discussion regarding the various Fiona books which Mosher should publish and in which of his series he should place them is confusing. The Fiona books published in his Old World Series are From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs, and Other Poems (1901, 1904, 1907, 1910, and 1917); Deirdrê and the Sons of Usna (1903); The Divine Adventure (1903); The Isle of Dreams (1905); and The Hour of Beauty: Songs and Poems (1907). Three Fiona books were published in Mosher’s Miscellaneous Series: The Silence of Amor: Prose Rhythms (1902); The House of Usna: A Drama (1903); and The Immortal Hour: A Drama in Two Acts (1907). The Fiona books he published in his Brocade Series are By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History (1902); The Tale of the Four White Swans (1904); and Ulad of the Dreams (1904). Each Mosher series differed from the others in design and format, but why he chose some works for one series and other works for another is unclear. For detailed bibliographic information about these and other Fiona Macleod books published by Thomas Mosher, consult Philip R. Bishop’s wonderful Thomas Bird Mosher: Pirate Prince of Publishers: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Source Guide to The Mosher Books Reflecting England’s National Literature and Design (1998).
9 Eleanora Duse (1861–1924) was an Italian actress. Gabrielle D’Annunzio wrote plays for her, among them “La Bioconda” and “Francesca da Rimini.” She was one of the first prominent actresses to perform in Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and “The Lady from the Sea.”
10 George Halkett (1855–1918) and Sharp had known each other since their schooldays in Glasgow. Both an artist and a writer, Halkett became the art critic for the Edinburgh Evening News in 1876 when he was only twenty-one. In 1892 he moved to London where he joined the Pall Mall Magazine as a political cartoonist and art critic. He contributed many items to Punch, and in 1897 he was appointed Editor of the Pall Mall Magazine. This letter is in Sharp’s hand to be copied by Mary. In reproducing the letter in the Memoir (p. 356), Mrs. Sharp omitted portions and mistakenly dated it “9th Jan” rather than “9th May.” According to Sharp’s diary he finished “The King’s Ring”, described in this letter, on Saturday, January 3, 1903.
11 According to E. A. S., “the story was accepted and the first installment was printed in the Pall Mall Magazine in May, 1904; but after its appearance the author did not care sufficiently for it to republish it in book form” (Memoir, p. 357). Flora Macdonald (1722–1790) aided Prince Charles of the House of Stuart in escaping the English forces after his army was defeated at Culloden in 1746. Flora dressed the Prince in women’s clothes and passed him off as her maid during the escape. She spent a year in the Tower of London for her part in the escape. Released from the Tower, she married and emigrated to North Carolina.
12 The Divine Adventure.
13 Edith Wingate Rinder.
14 The three reprints are The Divine Adventure (an essay), Deirdrê and the Sons of Usna (a story), and The House of Usna (a drama).
15 The “dedicatory introduction” to “Deirdrê,” which Fiona hoped to send the following Wednesday, is entitled “To Esther Mona,” Edith Rinder’s baby daughter, who was born on July 26, 1901.
16 Unable to identify Miss Moore. Since this letter is written on the stationery of a MacBrayne Royal Mail Steamer and Iona is handwritten following the printed masthead, Sharp may have taken the boat that sails out of Oban on Scotland’s west coast around the large Isle of Mull to Iona. In any case, he somehow acquired copies of the vessel’s stationery and had Mary copy this Fiona letter to Mosher, dated June 3 on the stationery to convey the impression she was visiting Iona. The series of correspondence implies that Fiona Macleod had traveled from the Lake District (Bowness on Lake Windermere) north to the Isle of Bute and then on to Iona. Sharp may have been taking this route at the time. If so, he was back in London by June 23 when he went down to Box Hill to visit George Meredith.
17 Esther Mona Rinder Harvey, to whom the volume is dedicated, would be two years old on July 26, 1903, and Sharp wanted to be able to give her mother, Edith Rinder, a set of page proofs of the dedication.
18 This letter is written in the Fiona handwriting on the stationery of David MacBrayne’s Royal Mail Steamer.
19 This statement suggests that Sharp, like the imaginary Fiona, was traveling in the west of Scotland and the Lake District from mid-May until mid-June.
20 Deirdrê and the Sons of Usna, 1903 (reprinted from the Laughter of Peterkin: a retelling of Old Tales from the Celtic Wonderland, London: Archibald, Constable and Co., 1897, with additional notes and a dedicatory Preface), and The House of Usna: A Drama, 1903 (reprinted from The Fortnightly Review, 1900, with a Foreword).
21 Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903).
22 In reproducing this letter in the Memoir, E. A. S. mentioned that it was written to a friend.
23 Mrs. Sharp said of this letter: “Goodbye it was in truth; but it was the older poet who recovered hold on life and outlived the younger by four years” (Memoir, p. 368). Sharp died on December 12, 1905; Meredith on May 18, 1909.
24 An American from Minneapolis, James Carleton Young (1856–1918) was president of the Western Mortgage Company, the James C. Young Land Company, the Imperial Investment Company, and the Central Trackage Company. In his spare time, he devoted himself to acquiring the “world’s best library” which would have all the important books that had been written. When possible, each book was to be inscribed by the author.
25 Sharp seems to have made this flying visit to Edinburgh the day after he visited Meredith since his letter to To James Carleton Young, June 23, 1903 written in his own hand and signed by him carries the Murrayfield, Midlothian return address.
26 The Divine Adventure, Deirdrê and the Sons of Usna, and The House of Usna.
27 The main body of this letter was typed, probably by Mary Sharp in Edinburgh. The signature and the postscript are in Mary’s Fiona Macleod hand.
28 The letter was written on Sunday July 5, and Sharp’s “At Home:” took place at the Grosvenor Club on July 6.
29 The book Sharp received from Garnett was a new and augmented edition of his Twilight of the Gods which Grant Richards published in the Spring. of 1903. See letter To Richard Garnett, July 28, 1903.
30 Arthur Tomson (1859–1905) was an English land- and seascape painter and a sympathetic and discriminating writer on art. His Jean-François Millet and the Barbizon School was published by G. Bell in 1903 and reissued in 1905. His Many Waters was published in 1904 by Walter Scott and Company. He contributed to the Art Journal descriptions of places in the southern counties, illustrated by his own drawings. He is buried in Steeple churchyard near his home in Wareham, Dorset.
31 Elizabeth’s mother and William’s aunt — Agnes Farquharson Sharp — died sometime between July 6 and July 13 since this letter and Sharp’s July 13 letter to Grant Richards are written on black-bordered mourning paper. Tuesday, July 14 is the probable date of this letter to Watts-Dunton which means Sharp invited him to have tea at the Grosvenor Club on the 16th or 18th.
32 The last sentence is inserted with an asterisk.
33 Ernest Rhys was a long-time friend of both Sharp and Watts-Dunton.
34 A reminiscence by Watts-Dunton of his first encounter with Gypsies as a young boy was published in Great Thoughts in 1903. Sharp’s mention of this “recent” publication dates the letter as 1903, and it must have been written in late June or early July when he was in London and staying temporarily at 9 St. Mary’s Terrace, Paddington. Elizabeth’s brother Robert Farquharson Sharp lived nearby at 56 St. Mary’s Mansions, Paddington. Gypsies figure prominently W-D’s Alwyn and his other works of fiction. See James Douglas, Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic (New York: John Lane, 1904), 61 ff.
35 This letter was probably typed by Edith Rinder from Sharp’s dictation. They put Fiona on a train to Edinburgh from London where she had been on an urgent visit involving an illness. This stratagem was to explain the fact that the letter does not have the Fiona signature. They did not want to delay the letter by sending it to Edinburgh for Mary to sign. The dedicatory page for the Swan story (“The Tale of the Four White Swans”) is missing from the typed letter which is among the Mosher papers at the New York Public Library (Berg Collection). The person who was ill and then, presumably, died may have been a London relative of Elizabeth Sharp.
36 Mosher published The House of Usna: A Drama by Fiona Macleod in his Miscellaneous Series in the fall of 1903. An endnote reads: “Four hundred and fifty copies of this book have been printed on Van Gelder hand-made paper and the type distributed.” Fifty numbered copies were printed on Japanese vellum. “Both the Van Gelder and the Japan vellum copies are bound in green printed Japan vellum wraps over boards. Renaissance border on the cover is signed “CW” for Charlotte Whittingham, designer for the Chiswick Press of London,” Thomas Bird Mosher: Pirate Prince of Publishers (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), p. 169. The House of Usna is dedicated to Mona Caird. A long “Foreword” by Fiona Macleod advocates a turn away from the realism of Ibsen to a spiritual drama. Mosher took a great deal of care over the printing of this volume, but it had a limited distribution, and the play, unlike Fiona Macleod’s other drama, The Immortal Hour, passed into oblivion.
37 A break occurs here in the typescript, and the dedication is absent. Fiona Macleod’s “The Tale of the Four White Swans” was first published in her The Laughter of Peterkin: A Retelling of Old Tales of the Celtic Wonderworld, a book intended for children which was published by Archibald Constable & Company in a beautiful edition with drawings by Sunderland Rollinson (London, 1897). Mosher published The Tale of the Four White Swans as a separate volume in his Brocade Series in April 1904 and issued new editions in 1907 and 1911.
38 Falkirk is located about half-way between Edinburgh and Glasgow on the northern route. The Sharps were staying with a family there while traveling in late July from London to Kilcreggan in the Inner Hebrides where they would spend August with his mother and sisters.
39 The new and augmented edition of Garnett’s Twilight of the Gods was published by Grant Edwards in the spring of 1903. Sharp thanked Garnett for the copy in late June before he had finished reading it and thanked him again here after reading several selections.
40 W. B. Yeats’s “Land of Heart’s Desire” appeared in volume nine of The Bibelot (June, 1903), 183–214.
41 Most likely Byways of Scottish Story, which appeared first in 1900. George Eyre-Todd (1862–1939) was a prolific writer and editor whose main interests were Scottish history and literature. The quotation about F. M. is not included with the letter in the New York Public Library collection.
42 Although unstated, the person to whom this letter is addressed was Bliss Perry (1860–1954). Sharp knew the previous editors (Scudder and Page), but he had not met Perry who was educated at Williams College and abroad. A pioneering scholar in the developing field of American Literature, Perry joined the Williams College faculty in 1886 and moved to Princeton University in 1893 where he taught until 1900. He was named Editor of the Atlantic in 1899 and held that position for ten years. He began teaching at Harvard University in 1907 and remained on that faculty until 1930.
43 Sharp’s “The Sicilian Highlands” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in April 1904 (93, 471–78).
44 This volume reprinted the title essay from Fiona’s The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History which was published in England by Chapman & Hall in 1900. In a letter To Thomas Mosher, April 24, [1903], Fiona said the essay could appear in Mosher’s Old World Series: “There is not much to revise, except a little deletion and dovetailing near the end. But I’ll go over it again carefully, and hope to see my way to add somewhat. And I shall write some prefatory matter.” The volume was dedicated “To Millicent,” but I do not know who she was.
45 Sharp must have written this letter for Mary to copy when he was recuperating with Elizabeth in Llandrindod Wells. The announced volume was probably “The House of Beauty” an anthology of poems Sharp hoped to publish as Fiona Macleod in the fall of 1903. This volume did not materialize, and “The Hour of Beauty” became a section of posthumous editions of Fiona Macleod’s poetry which were entitled From the Hills of Dream and arranged by Elizabeth Sharp in accordance with her husband’s wishes.
46 Isabella (Murray) Gilchrist was the mother of Sharp’s friend R. Murray Gilchrist whom the Sharps had visited their home in Derbyshire: Cartledge Hall, Holmesfield.
47 See Endnote 44.
48 Supposedly written while Fiona was in Algeciras, on the Spanish gulf, this letter is in the Fiona handwriting. Sharp must have received the copy of The House of Usna, forwarded from Edinburgh, when he reached Hood’s Castle Maniace in the first week of November. He then drafted this letter and sent it for Mary to copy and mail to Mosher from Edinburgh.
49 Sharp wrote this letter while staying at Alexander Nelson Hood’s Castle Maniace on the northern slopes of Mt. Etna before going down to Taormina for a few days and then on to Greece.
50 Sharp assumed Mrs. J. H. Philpot would be especially appreciative of this description of trees. She was the author of The Sacred Tree in Religion and Myth (London: Macmillan, 1897) and other popular books and pamphlets about spiritualist associations with trees. Little is known about Sharp’s relationship with her though he may have met her through Dr. John Goodchild since the three shared the conviction that spirits inhabited the natural world and communicated frequently with those attuned to their messages.
51 The sentence in brackets was written in the left margin of the letter to imply it was an afterthought. It was not; its purpose was to explain to Mosher why the letter was being mailed from Edinburgh, where Sharp’s sister Mary transposed a draft into the Fiona Macleod handwriting, rather than from Greece.
52 E. A. S. said this letter was written “at the New Year.”
53 “Maison Merlin | Seker Road | Athens.”
54 Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913) was a banker, statesman, and naturalist. As a member of Parliament from 1870, he introduced many reform bills, especially in banking, including legislation establishing bank holidays. His scientific contributions were in entomology and anthropology and include his Prehistoric Times (1865), long used as a textbook in several languages. Popular works include Ants, Bees, and Wasps (1882) and The Pleasures of Life (two volumes, pp. 1887–89). He was given the title Baron Avebury in 1900. Sir Lewis Morris (1833–1907) was a popular poet of the Anglo-Welsh school who was born in Carmarthen in southwest Wales. He studied Classics at Oxford, graduating in 1856, where he was the first student in thirty years to obtain first-class honors in both his preliminary and final examinations. He became a lawyer and published multiple volumes of popular verse. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1895 and narrowly missed being appointed Poet Laureate, possibly because of his association with Oscar Wilde. One of his most famous poems is “Love’s Suicide”. Sharp had a low opinion of the writings of both men.
55 Excerpted from lines 53–54 of Pindar’s 7th Nemean Ode, which has been translated as “Respite is sweet in every deed. Even honey may cloy, and the delightful flowers of Aphrodite” (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162%3Abook%3DN.%3Apoem%3D7).
Chapter 24
1 Ernest Rhys printed and transcribed in his Letters from Limbo this page of the letter he received from Sharp. Watts-Dunton edited The Athenaeum from 1876 to 1898. In 1904, he remained in a position to commission an article from Sharp. See the “Life” section of this chapter for the context in which Rhys set this fragment.
2 Theodore Watts-Dunton.
3 Following this ellipsis, Rhys wrote: “Then he runs on to speak of plans for further wanderings in Greece:”
4 Alfred Turner Nutt (1856–1916) took over his father’s publishing business in 1878 and continued heading the firm until his death. He founded the Goethe Society in 1886 and jointly founded the Irish Texts Society in 1898. He was the author of The Legend of the Holy Grail (1888) and The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal to the Land of the Living (1895). This letter is in Sharp’s hand for Mary to copy.
5 Supposedly Fiona had been staying with the Sharps in Athens. Here Sharp describes her as “having left,” but does not describe her location. The Sharps stayed on in Greece through March. It would not have been wise to have her so long in one place in case the news got out and someone tried to visit her.
6 Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish (1903) for which Yeats wrote the introduction.
7 Nutt must have suggested Fiona undertake a compendium of Gaelic tales in English to compete with and improve upon Lady Gregory’s recently published book.
8 This comment reflects Yeats’ estrangement from Sharp which was partially due to Sharp’s increasing absence from London and partially due to the contempt for Sharp among some of Yeats’ Irish compatriots. It also reflects Sharp/Macleod’s belief that Yeats’ involvement in the cause of Irish nationalism and his relationship with Maud Gonne, an active Nationalist, interfered with his imaginative work and his devotion to spiritualism and the occult. After Sharp died in 1905, Yeats came to regret the estrangement and to believe he had not sufficiently valued Sharp’s friendship. Later he lost interest in the Celtic movement, as represented by Fiona Macleod, and in Sharp, and joined others in ridiculing him for inventing a female mouthpiece.
9 The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael which was published by Chapman and Hall in October 1904.
10 Neither of these books was completed.
11 Pentelicos is a mountain in Attica, northeast of Athens overlooking Kephisia, a deme (suburb) of ancient Athens which was the home of the dramatist Menander (342–291 BC) who wrote more than a hundred Greek comedies. This and other descriptions of Sharp’s walks in the hills around Athens moved Ernest Rhys to comment in Letters from Limbo: “Not a bad way-bill for a sick wanderer, but whatever else he might be he always took his ailments and his threatened fate with courage and at times with a histrionic relish of his own predicament” (p. 80).
12 The Sharps spent four months in Greece — December through March — and this letter states they will leave Greece “this day week.” Thus, the date of March 24.
13 Since the typed letter is not signed in Mary’s Fiona Macleod hand, it must have been typed in London and sent by Edith Rinder to Mosher. Sharp wanted to get its message to Mosher quickly, and this procedure was faster than sending the penciled letter to Edinburgh for Mary to copy into the Fiona Macleod hand. For a discussion of the content of the letter and the genesis and content of Fiona Macleod’s The Winged Destiny, see the “Life” section of this chapter.
14 This volume was published posthumously as Where the Forest Murmurs: Nature Essays (London: George Newnes, Ltd., and New York: Charles Scribner and Son, 1906). It did not include “The Magic Kingdoms.”
15 This new proposed edition did not materialize in 1904. Rather, Mosher reissued in 1904 his 1901 edition of From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Other Poems (Old World Series). A new edition of From the Hills of Dream did not appear until 1907 when it was published in England by William Heinemann.
16 Although Sharp began this letter complaining about Mosher’s including an essay intended for The Winged Destiny in The Bibelot, here he suggests Mosher publish an entire section of the volume as a book. Since it would take time for a book to appear, it would not interfere with the sale of the Chapman and Hall volume in the United States. More important, Mosher would pay Fiona for a book, but not for an essay in The Bibelot, a publication designed to advertise Mosher’s books.
17 Henri David Davray (1873–1944) translated several Fiona Macleod tales into French for the Mercury de France, but the collection of tales did not materialize. He was the author of Chez les Anglia’s Pendant la Grande Guerre (1916); Through French Eyes (1916); and Lord Kitchener: His Work and His Prestige (1917).
18 This reviewer was probably Helen Bartlett Bridgman. Mosher must have sent a copy of her review of earlier Fiona Macleod works to Fiona which occasioned the long letter of appreciation to Mrs. Bridgeman in September.
19 Edith Rinder wanted to assure Mosher that the six additional copies he sent had arrived.
20 Alexander Jessup, born in 1871, was the General Editor of a series called French Men of Letters for the J. P. Lippincott Company in Philadelphia. He was also the General Editor of a series called Little French Masterpieces for G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York. He is best known for his editions of American short stories, the most popular being The Best American Humorous Short Stories which was first published in 1920.
21 The south of France.
22 The nature of the “concurrent work” is unknown. See letter To [Alexander Jessup], September 20, 1904 (Volume 3), in which Sharp tells Jessup he is too ill to continue with the Leconte de L’Isle book they agreed he would write. He also told Jessup that the terms he originally accepted — a volume of 75,000 words for an advance of twenty pounds — were insufficient. He said he had recently received a much better offer for a shorter Leconte de L’Isle volume from another American publisher of a similar series, but there is no supporting evidence for such an offer.
23 E. A. S. gave no date for this letter, but she placed it in the Memoir following a long quotation from the “Dedicatory Introduction” of The Winged Destiny and preceding two letters regarding that volume. It is reasonable to date the letter in July. The essay that gave its title to the book deals extensively with fate and destiny as do several other pieces in the book. The topic was much on his mind as he contemplated the likelihood that he did not have much longer to achieve the highest ideals of “beauty” in the Fiona writings.
24 “The Lynn of Dreams,” The Contemporary Review, 82 (December, 1902), 863–65.
25 This letter describes a day spent with Dr. John Goodchild at Glastonbury and identifies that day as August 1. Since he said in the letter that this day was yesterday, it was written on August 2. Its recipient was not in England on that lovely day which increases the likelihood Roselle Lathrop Shields was its recipient. See the “Life” section of this chapter.
26 A heavily edited version of this letter appears in the Memoir, pp. 386–87.
27 The phrases “in more ways than one” and “a garden of Eden” are covert references to his new-found love for Roselle Lathrop Shields who had a salutary effect on his health and spirits. For a further discussion of Sharp’s relationship with Mrs. Shields, see the “Life” section of this chapter.
28 Sharp’s Literary Geography (London: Pall Mall Publications, 1904).
29 Elizabeth Sharp’s Rembrandt: with Forty Illustrations (London: Methuen and Company, 1903).
30 Printed in the September 14, 1904 London Daily Chronicle, this letter was preceded by the following editorial comment: “We have received the following very interesting letter, which we regret we cannot acknowledge in a personal way, because it bears no address”.
31 Mosher published The Tale of the Four White Swans in his Brocade Series in April 1904. It was one of the tales in Fiona Macleod’s The Laughter of Peterkin, a book of stories for children published by Archibald Constable in 1897 where it was titled “The Four White Swans”. Ulad of the Dreams, which Mosher published in his Brocade Series in September 1904, appeared first in Fiona’s The Dominion of Dreams published by Archibald Constable in 1899.
32 Sharp enclosed with this letter both Fiona’s September 14 letter in the Chronicle and her letter to Helen Bridgman, a close friend of Mosher.
33 Helen Bartlett Bridgman (1855–1935) was an American writer and world traveler. Born in Milwaukee in 1855, she spent most of her childhood in New England. Among her books are An American Woman’s Plea for Germany (1915); Looking Toward Peace (1915); Play Fair! (1915); Gems (1916); Within My Horizon (1920); Conquering the World (1925); and The Last Passion (1925). In 1887, she married Herbert Lawrence Bridgman (1844–1924), an explorer and journalist who has been described as the “Ulysses of journalists” for his work in organizing the Robert Perry expedition to the North Pole. Perry sent Bridgman the code cable “Sun” (meaning “We have reached the world’s end”). Bridgman led the relief expedition in 1894 after Perry was lost in the Arctic. With no surviving children, Bridgman specified that his estate, upon the death of his widow, would go to the State University of New York to establish scholarships for New York students. Mrs. Bridgman died at her home in Brooklyn in 1935. This letter responds to a letter to Fiona from Mrs. Bridgman which Mosher forwarded with some favorable reviews of the Fiona writings by Mrs. Bridgman.
34 Robert Donald (1860–1933) was Editor of The Daily Chronicle from 1904 until 1918. He was thoughtful and principled, with a firm belief in objective reporting and editorial independence. Under his direction, the paper was broadly supportive of the radical wing of the Liberal Party under David Lloyd George. The subject of the letter is a prefatory note Donald added to the Fiona Macleod letter he published in the September 14, 1904 issue of The Daily Chronicle.
35 In June, Alexander Jessup asked Sharp to do a volume in the French Men of Letters series he was editing for Lippincott. Sharp replied that because of “concurrent work” he would like to do a volume on Mistral, Leconte de L’Isle, or Villiers de L’Isle Adam. He could do the work during the coming winter and let Jessup have it in the spring, but he could make no commitment until he heard Jessup’s terms. Aside from the health problems that would prevent his going forward with a book on Le Conte de L’Isle, Sharp found Jessup’s monetary terms insufficient.
36 Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) was a poet and dramatist. Among his works are Cinq-Mars (1847); Servitude et grandeur militaires (1857) and, posthumously published, Daphne (1873); Journal d’un poète (1882); Laurette (1890). Joseph Albert Glatigny (1839–1873) was a poet. Among his works are Les Vignes folles (1860); Les Flèches d’or (1864); L’illustre Brizacier (1873). José Maria Heredia (1803–1839) was a Spanish poet who wrote Poesias de Don José Maria Heredia (1853); Sonnets of José Maria de Heredia (1897); Los Trofeos, Romancero y los Conquistadores de Oro Poesias (1908).
37 The intended recipient of this letter must have been the widow of E. C. Stedman’s son, Frederick, who also seems to have written to Sharp expressing regret that the Stedmans could not have the Sharps as house guests and offering the service of her daughter Laura in helping the Sharps find lodging in New York. Laura served as E. C. Stedman’s literary secretary from 1898 until his death in 1908.
38 The Sharps left England on the SS. Menominee on Thursday, November 3, and arrived in New York on Sunday November 13. This was Elizabeth’s first visit to the United States.
39 Sharp wrote a letter to Stedman each year and mailed it so it would arrive on or near his October 8 birthday.
40 William McLennan (1856–1904) was a Canadian writer who often contributed to H. M. Alden’s Harper’s Magazine. He died in late August while visiting Italy with his wife.
41 The “dedicatory prelude” was the “Prefatory Epistle to Esther Mona” in Fiona Macleod’s Deirdrê and the Sons of Usna (Portland, ME: Mosher, 1903). The little girl, to whom the epistle was dedicated, was the daughter of Edith and Frank Rinder. Mosher’s Ulad of the Dreams (September 1904 and reprinted in 1907) appeared first as an essay in Fiona’s Dominion of Dreams (London: Archibald Constable, 1899). The Mosher volume was also dedicated “To Esther Mona,” but without the prelude. The Four Swans of Lir was published by Mosher in April 1904 (reprinted in 1907 and 1911). It appeared first as “The Four White Swans” in Fiona’s The Laughter of Peterkin, A Retelling of Old Tales of the Celtic Wonderworld (London: Archibald Constable, 1897). See Endnote 31.
42 This letter was written early in the week before the Sharps left England on November 3.
43 See Endnotes 20 and 35.
44 Garnett’s play, entitled William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, was published in 1905.
45 Robert Farquharson Sharp was married to Hildur Wildebrand in October 1904. Richard Garnett (1835–1906) was Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum from 1890–1899 when he retired from the Museum. Robert Farquharson Sharp (1865–1945) served as Keeper of Printed Books at the Museum from 1924–1929. His son, Noel Farquharson Sharp, was a mainstay of that Department from the 1930s well into the 1970s.
46 Caroline Hazard (1856–1945) was born in Rhode Island and educated by private tutors at Mary A. Shaw’s School in Providence. After further study in Europe, she helped her father in business and created a welfare center in Rhode Island where she taught sewing and other domestic skills. In 1899, she was appointed the third President of Wellesley College, a position she held with distinction until 1910. She introduced household economics into the curriculum, created a department of hygiene and physical education, and founded the college choir. Following her years at Wellesley, she traveled widely and championed the education of women. She was also active in many philanthropic organizations in Rhode Island, New York, and California where she had a home in Santa Barbara and where she died in 1945. She was a good friend of Catherine Janvier whose brother was President of Lehigh College (Henry S. Drinker) and of Edith Bucklin Hartshorn Mason who entertained the Sharps for a weekend in Rhode Island on their way to Boston. Well-established among the elite of Rhode Island society, Hazard and Mason were members of the Colonial Dames of Rhode Island and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Catherine Janvier, Caroline Hazard, and Edith Mason were, like Elizabeth Sharp, intelligent and accomplished advocates of the advancement of women.
47 Here is the following description of Halidon Hall in Newport and the Masons’ residence by Avis Gunther-Rosenberg (The Providence Journal, February 14, 2004): “‘Teahouse Steeped in Newport History’ Aerie Cottage is the former teahouse of Halidon Hill, a 19th-century estate that once consisted of three large houses and three barns on 14 acres. Built in 1853 by a Scottish stone mason, the Gothic 20-something-room Halidon Hall was named after a battle in 1333 at which the English defeated the Scottish, with a loss of 14,000 lives. In 1894, Arthur Livingston Mason and wife Edith Bucklin Hartshorn Mason took up residence at Halidon Hall, according to the youngest of the eight children, Lion Gardiner Mason. Mason published his memoirs — A Lion’s Share — on his 87th birthday, Oct. 5, 1983. The Mason family had several claims to fame. Arthur Livingston Mason owned the Newport Engineering Works, an automobile and marine business, and was narrowly defeated in the Newport mayoral race of 1898 by Patrick Boyle, losing by only 198 votes. His wife Edith organized the R.I. Sanitary and Relief Association during the Spanish-American War and was responsible for two inventions designed to help wounded soldiers — a lamp shade that shielded patients’ eyes from light while leaving the bulb exposed on one side to aid the surgeons, and a flannel abdominal bandage called the ‘Mason band.’”
48 According to E. A. S., Sharp, while in New York, wrote to Alden on Fiona Macleod’s behalf proposing that he take some of her nature essays for Harper’s Magazine. Sharp and Alden had been good friends for many years, and Sharp had told Alden the truth about Fiona. They saw each other when Sharp was in New York, and this letter was intended to formalize proposals Sharp made orally. The W. S. essay proposing a new Doctor of Criticism degree was, according to E. A. S., a project amongst many others which was “never worked out” (Memoir, p. 392).
49 Bliss Perry edited the Atlantic Monthly from 1899 until 1909. See Endnote 42, Chapter 23 (Volume 3). The letterhead on this stationery is Lawrence Park, Bronxville, N. Y. where the Stedmans lived. In his letter To Edmund Clarence Stedman, [late September, 1905] (Volume 3) in late September 1905, Sharp recalled his spending Thanksgiving with the Stedmans in 1904. That year Thanksgiving was on November 24. Hence the date of this letter.
50 This letter was written on the stationery of The Century Association | 7 West 43rd Street | New York with the letterhead crossed out. Established in 1847, the Century Association was, at that time, a New York City club of “authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts,” whose early members included editor/poet William Cullen Bryant and painters Asher Durand, Winslow Homer, and John Frederick Kensett, and architect Stanford White. The Century evolved from an earlier organization, the Sketch Club, founded by Bryant and his friends in 1829. The Century has a notable art collection, including important works by Durand, Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty, and other Hudson River School painters. It is also an important venue for the exhibition of contemporary art created by its members. In 1989, after a strenuous legal battle, the club began admitting women. Located on West 43rd Street since 1891, the Century occupies a club house designed by Stanford White. Stedman, among other New York luminaries in the arts and letters, was a member of the Century and arranged a temporary membership for Sharp when he was in New York.
51 Helen Bartlett Bridgman. See Endnote 33.
52 Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) was an American author and lecturer who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She was married to Samuel Gridley Howe, a reformer and teacher of the blind, and they lived in Boston. The author of numerous travel books, biographies, dramas, and verse books for children, Mrs Howe was a strong advocate of equal education for all children as well as professional and business opportunities for women.
53 Roger Livingston Scaife (1875–1951) graduated from Harvard in 1897 and two years later joined the staff of the Atlantic Monthly, which was published by the Houghton, Mifflin Company. Shortly thereafter he transferred to Houghton Mifflin and soon became a Director. He retained that position until 1934 when he left to become Vice President and a Director at Little, Brown. In 1943, he was appointed Director of the Harvard University Press, a position he held until his retirement in 1948. Through the years he interacted with many well-known writers and exercised considerable influence within the publishing business. When Sharp called on Bliss Perry, the Atlantic’s Editor, with an introduction from Stedman, he mentioned not only articles Perry might like for the magazine, but also a book for which he had been taking notes on monuments of ancient Greek civilization. Perry introduced Sharp to Scaife who asked for a written proposal which Sharp hastily wrote on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 6. The lengthy proposal, in the form of a letter to Houghton Mifflin, succeeds this letter to Scaife.
54 The St. Botolph Club was a club for men founded in 1880 for artists and prominent members of Boston society. Like the Century Club in New York, it held annual exhibitions. Among its founders were Thomas Jefferson Coolidge, Frederic Porter Vinton, William Dean Howells, architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and sculptor Daniel Chester French. Someone arranged for Sharp to use the club during his few days in Boston.
55 In 1927, the town of Girgenti took the name of its province, Agrigento. The Greeks called the town Akragas, later known as Agrigentum by the Romans, and the Saracens corrupted this name to Kerkent from which later residents derived Girgenti. An important Greek port city on the southwest coast of Sicily, Akragas was the home of Empedocles (490–430) and has the best-preserved series of Doric temples outside Greece.
56 For Julia Ward Howe, see Endnote 52.
57 Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) was a wealthy art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts whose collection is housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Shortly after her marriage to the wealthy John Lowell “Jack” Gardner in 1860, the couple settled in Boston and began collecting works of art. Before he died in 1898, Jack Gardner decided their Boston House was not large enough for their growing collection and began planning a museum to house it. After his death, Isabella acquired a piece of land in the newly developing fens area and hired Willard T. Sears, a Boston architect, to design a museum modeled on the Renaissance palaces of Venice. In the early years, an apartment on the fourth floor was Mrs. Garner’s home. She entertained guests frequently, often for musicals, but also opened the museum to the public two days each year. For the museum’s opening night — January 1, 1903 — four hundred guests were entertained by members of the Boston Symphony. Aware that the Sharps had served as London art critics for the Glasgow Herald and written extensively about art, Caroline Hazard arranged for the Sharps to visit Mrs. Gardner for a private tour of Fenway Court.
58 Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929) was an American poet, literary critic, and dramatist. Among her works are The College Beautiful and Other Poems (1887); American Literature (1898); Spanish Highways and Byways (1900); English Drama (1902); Once Upon a Time (1921). The Sharps met her when they visited Wellesley on 5 December. This letter was written shortly before they sailed from Boston on the Romantic on Saturday, December 10.
59 After meeting the Sharps at Wellesley, Katherine Bates sent the Sharps Margaret Pollock Sherwood’s Daphne which Houghton Mifflin published in 1903.
60 Spanish Highways and Byways (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1900).
61 Houghton Mifflin accepted Sharp’s proposal to produce a book called Greek Background that would focus on Sicily and Calabria. They would wait to see how that volume sold before committing to a proposed second volume on Greece.
62 The Sharp’s sailed from Boston aboard the S. S. Romantic on Saturday, December 10. After the snow in Boston and the rough sea voyage, they landed in Naples, grateful for the warmth of Italy. They went north to spend Christmas with Doctor John Goodchild and other friends in Bordighera, a resort town on the Italian Riviera where Sharp wrote this letter to Gilchrist. In the next week, the couple travelled south to Rome and took rooms in a fashionable hotel where they planned to stay several months.
63 Ethel Goddard was an intensely patriotic and religious Irish writer. Her Dreams of Ireland was first published in 1903 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co.) and went through many editions. It is a collection of sentimental reflections on rural Ireland, past and present. This letter is transcribed from a document among the Sharp papers in the National Library of Scotland. It is in Sharp’s hand and was sent from Italy to Edinburgh for Mary Sharp to copy into the Fiona Macleod hand and mail. A note from Sharp to Mary on the manuscript reads as follows: “if you do not have her address in Ireland, then post to her | c/o The Editor ‘The Fortnightly Review’ | 11 Henrietta St. | Covent Garden | London.” Sharp then crossed through that note and wrote “Donard Demesne | Donard | Co. Wicklow | Ireland.” Sharp wrote “Return” in the upper left corner of the first page. Writing as Fiona Macleod, Sharp said of Goddard’s book in “Anima Celtica”: “Surcharged with the intensest spirit of Ireland in the less mystical and poetic sense, is the slim volume of a handful of prose papers by Miss Ethel Goddard, entitled Dreams for Ireland. This book is uplifted with a radiant hope and with an ecstasy of spiritual conviction that make the heart young to contemplate: and would God that its glad faith and untroubled prophecies could be fulfilled in our time, or that in our time even the shadows of the great things to come could lighten the twilight road.”
64 “The Winged Destiny and Fiona Macleod,” The Fortnightly Review, 76 (December, 1904), 1037–44.
65 Wind und Woge, Keltische Sagen, Authoristert Ausgabe aus dem Englishen ubersitzt und einegeleiten von Winnibald Mey (Jena und Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1905).
66 This entire paragraph is crossed out, and someone wrote “type this” in the left margin next to the paragraph. Mary must not have included it in the letter she sent to Miss Goddard.
67 Lawrence Gilman (1878–1939) was a critic who wrote extensively about the music of Charles Loeffler (1861–1935) and Edward MacDowell (1861–1908), major figures in American music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Among his publications are Phases of Modern Music (1904); The Music of Tomorrow (1907); Stories of Symphonic Music (1907); Edward MacDowell (1906); Music and the Cultivated Man (1929); and Wagner’s Operas (1937). From 1896 to 1898, Gilman worked for the New York Herald, then from 1901 to 1913 as a music critic for Harper’s Weekly, where he advanced to the position of Managing Editor. From 1915 to 1923, he was a critic in multiple arts for The North American Review, and for the Herald Tribune from 1925 until his death. Sharp would have met Gilman at the office of Harper’s Weekly in Boston in early December, and this letter is an effort to establish a bond between Fiona and Gilman in the hope of encouraging favorable notices for the Fiona writings.
Chapter 25
1 Sharp’s “04” date was a mistake not uncommon in early January.
2 Sharp made a “flying visit” to Dorset to see Thomas Hardy in March 1892. In a note of appreciation to Sharp, Hardy said he was particularly struck by his “power of grasping the characteristics of this district and people in a few hours visit, during which, as far as I could see, you were not observing anything” (Memoir, p. 199).
3 William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a prolific and highly-regarded American man of letters who is best known for his realist novels The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). Poems he wrote between 1873 and 1886 were published in a volume called Stops of Various Quills in 1895. Sharp first met Howells in Venice in 1883.
4 Louis Chandler Moulton (1835–1908) occupied a prominent place in American literary society. She published several volumes of poetry and short fiction and wrote regular columns on literature in the New York Tribune (1870–1876) and a weekly literary letter in the Sunday Boston Herald (1886–1892). Starting in the mid-1870s she spent summers in London and the rest of the year in Boston. She developed close friendships with leading literary figures in the United States, in Great Britain, and on the continent.
5 The Sharps left Rome at the end of February. According to Elizabeth, the main reason for shortening their stay was not social distractions, but her husband’s health: “There we saw a few friends — in particular Robert Hichens who was also wintering there; but my husband did not feel strong enough for any social effort (Memoir, pp. 393–94).
6 Modern Italian Poets: Essays and Versions (1887).
7 Lauretta Stedman was the granddaughter of E. C. Stedman.
8 Robert Underwood Johnson (1853–1937) was Associate Editor of The Century Illustrated Magazine from 1881–1909 and Editor from 1909–1913. Sharp had proposed several articles to him and the magazine’s Editor, Richard Watson Gilder, when they met in New York in December. Johnson was also a poet (his works include The Winter Hoar and Other Poems (1892); Songs of Liberty and Other Poems (1902); Poems of War and Peace (1916); Poems of the Lighter Touch (1930)), and he served as American Ambassador to Rome in 1920–1921.
9 Sharp’s Sicily articles appeared posthumously in the Century as follows: “The Garden of the Sun,” Part I in March, 1906, Part II in April, 1906, and “Route-Notes in Sicily” (illustrated) in May, 1906. These two articles and a third (“The Portraits of Keats: With Special Reference to Those by Severn,” February, 1906) resulted from Sharp’s meeting with Gilder and Johnson.
10 Elizabeth Sharp reprinted the first paragraph of this letter in the Memoir (p. 394).
11 William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1903).
12 Mosher chose The Isle of Dreams as the title of this book which he published later in 1905.
13 The next volume of Fiona Macleod poems Mosher published was The Hour of Beauty in 1907. Its contents are the same as the section entitled “The Hour of Beauty” in the 1907 edition of From the Hills of Dream published by William Heinemann in London.
14 Although Mosher did not publish a volume entitled The Sunset of Old Tales or Orpheus and Oisin, the volume of Fiona Macleod tales published by Tauchnitz in Leipzig in 1905 was titled The Sunset of Old Tales.
15 Mosher published The Wayfarer as a separate volume in 1906. It was part of a three-volume set (along with The Distant Country & Other Prose Poems, 1907, and Three Legends of the Christ Child, 1908) that Mosher called the “Ideal Series of Little Masterpieces” which were designed to be brought together in a cabinet-style box.
16 When he met Mosher in Boston, Sharp must have told him he and Fiona were lovers since that would explain their frequent, furtive meetings and her allusiveness. What might someday be made “still clearer” to Mosher was simply that Sharp was the woman he claimed to love.
17 Sharp composed this letter in Ventnor and sent it to Edinburgh where Mary typed it. The text from “In great haste” through to the signature are in Mary’s Fiona script.
18 Born in 1846, William John Robertson was best known for his A Century of French Verse: Brief Biographical and Critical Notices of Thirty-Three French Poets of the Nineteenth Century with Experimental Translations from their Poems (London: A. D. Innes, 1895). He also published several books on French grammar and, in 1896, a High School History of Greece and Rome. During their dinner before Sharp left London, they must have shared their fondness for expensive cigars since Robertson had a box of 100 “valuable Indian cheroots” sent to Sharp in Edinburgh. Given Sharp’s humorous efforts to Gallicize Robertson’s name, they must have also shared an interest in the Gaelic west of Scotland. Since Sharp knew and admired French poetry, especially Provençal poetry, they had a good deal in common though this is the first mention of Robertson I have found among Sharp’s acquaintances.
19 After spending the last two weeks of March on the Isle of Wight, Sharp went first to London and then on to Edinburgh to visit his mother before leaving with his sister Mary for Oban and the small Isle of Lismore in Loch Linnhe.
20 The book was Garnett’s William Shakespeare, Pedagogue and Poacher, A Drama (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head Press, 1904).
21 Elizabeth reprinted a slightly altered version of this letter in the Memoir (pp. 397–98). She wrote in pencil at the top of the manuscript: Lismore | April 19, 1905. Sharp and his sister Mary had traveled by train to Glasgow and then northwest to Oban. From the Port of Appin north of Oban they crossed to the island of Lismore where they stayed about a week with Mr. and Mrs. MacCaskill who occupied one of the island’s few houses on its northern tip. A native Gaelic speaker, MacCaskill was the source of many mysterious tales and superstitions that found their way into the Fiona Macleod writings.
22 Macleod’s “The Tribe of Plover,” “The Clans of Grass,” and “The Wild Apple” appeared in Where the Forest Murmurs: Nature Essays (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1906) which was published after Sharp’s death.
23 County Ross and Cromarty extends from the east to the west coast of North Scotland and includes the Outer Hebrides.
24 Ben Nevis, the highest peak in Great Britain, overlooks the loch which contains Lismore.
25 Duror is a fishing village seventeen miles northeast of Oban.
26 Paul Fort (1872–1960) was a French poet who, in 1905, founded and edited Vers et Prose, a literary review associated with Valéry. Jean Moréas (1856–1910) was a French poet who founded the periodical La Symboliste in 1886 and played a leading role in the French Symbolist Movement. Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916) was a Belgian poet who wrote in French. René François Armand (1839–1907), a Parnassian poet, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1901. Jules Claretie (1840–1913) was a journalist, critic, and chronicler.
27 Elizabeth said this postcard was sent from Oban. Since it describes an event on Lismore, Sharp wrote it on the island and mailed it when he and Mary spent the night in Oban after leaving the island
28 Short for: verbum sat sapienti est (“a word to the wise is sufficient”).
29 The man Sharp met on the train was Ralph Copeland, the Astronomer Royal of Scotland. Appointed to this position in 1889, he worked first as the Director of the Calton Hill Observatory in Edinburgh and then of the new observatory on Blackford Hill, Edinburgh when it opened in 1896. Copeland traveled widely to observe astronomical events, and his discoveries earned him a world-wide reputation. Seven of the galaxies in the constellation Leo form the “Copeland Septet.” Mount Copeland in northwest Canada was named for him as was Copeland Ridge and nearby Copeland Creek. Born in 1837, he was sixty-eight years old when he and Sharp lunched together on the train. Both men would be dead by year’s end, Copeland in October and Sharp in December.
30 In the Memoir, Elizabeth printed this paragraph and the next as a separate letter dated April 24. They are, in fact, the concluding paragraphs of this manuscript letter which E. A. S. dated in pencil as April 25. She did not include the preceding paragraphs in the Memoir. The sequence suggests Sharp and Mary left Lismore on the 24th, spent the night in Oban, and took the Oban/Glasgow train on the 25th.
31 Sharp’s “The Portraits of Keats with Special Reference to Those by Severn,” Century Illustrated Magazine, 71 (February, 1906), 535–51. See Sharp’s letters To Robert Underwood Johnson, February 5, [1905] (Volume 3) and To Richard Watson Gilder, February 5, 1905 (Volume 3).
32 William Hilton (1786–1839) was an English portrait and history painter who trained at the Royal Academy School and eventually became Keeper of the Royal Academy. Successful in his lifetime with huge history paintings in the “Grand Manner”, he is best known today for his portraits of the poets John Keats and John Clare. He, Joseph Severn, and Benjamin Hayden (1786–1846) were close friends of Keats. Haydon also specialized in grand historical pictures and painted some portraits, most notably of William Wordsworth.
33 After studying briefly at Keio University in Tokyo, Yone Noguchi (1875–1947) went to San Francisco in 1893 and met Joaquin Miller who encouraged him to become a poet and introduced him to other San Francisco Bay writers. He published two books of poetry in 1897: Seen & Unseen, or, Monologues of a Homeless Snail and The Voice of the Valley. He moved to New York in 1900 and, in 1902, to London where he self-published and promoted a third book of poetry, From the Eastern Sea (1903), and interacted with many leading literary figures: William Michael Rossetti, Laurence Binyon, William Butler Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Laurence Housman, and Arthur Symons. An admirer of the Fiona Macleod poetry, Noguchi sent her a copy of From the Eastern Sea which she acknowledged in this letter. Noguchi’s presence in England explains Sharp’s putting her “at sea” when she wrote the letter. Elizabeth says Noguchi sent Fiona a copy of “his subsequent book The Summer Cloud, a collection of short prose poems, which he explained in his note of presentation: ‘In fact I had been reading your prose poems, The Silence of Amor, and wished I could write such pieces myself. And here is the result.’” Noguchi’s return to New York before The Summer Cloud was published in 1906 may explain why he had not heard Fiona was Sharp and no longer living. Years later Noguchi returned to Japan and avidly supported in the thirties Japan’s expansionist and militaristic regimes.
34 Elizabeth wrote in pencil at the top of the manuscript the date and “Neuernahr” and bracketed sections to include in the Memoir (pp. 400–02) where she also said the cold weather on Lismore “proved so disastrous” that her “husband was ordered to Neuernahr for special treatment”. Sharp spent five weeks in London after his return from Lismore working on the article on Keats’ portraits before leaving on June 10 or 11 for Bad Neuernahr where he stayed four weeks.
35 A section of the manuscript is missing here.
36 Another section of the manuscript is missing here.
37 Elizabeth printed part of this letter in the Memoir following a portion of the previous letter identifying it only as “Monday evening.” I have not located the manuscript. It could have been written on either Monday the 19th or the 26th, but its fresh impressions of the Villa and its surroundings suggest the former. The letter shows a surprisingly child-friendly aspect of Sharp’s personality as it was clearly intended to be read to Marjorie who Elizabeth identified as “the little daughter of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Tomson.” Elizabeth sent the letter on to the Tomsons after using it for the Memoir.
38 According to Elizabeth, this letter was written in Neuenahr (Memoir, pp. 399–400).
39 Abrahamina Arnolda Louise ‘Bramine’ Hubrecht (Donders) (Grandmont) (1855–1913).
40 The manuscript ends here, and the lines that follow are included in the Memoir (p. 402).
41 The last section of the manuscript is missing.
42 Someone, perhaps Severn, wrote “Sunday 16: Jany” at the top of the manuscript letter. This is clearly a mistake for “July”.
43 Nigel Severn was the son of Walter Severn (1830–1904), a well-known and accomplished artist, and the grandson of Joseph Severn (1793–1879), a portraitist and friend of Keats who accompanied him to Rome and stayed with him until he died. In the Memoir (p. 168), Elizabeth said Walter Severn gave Sharp access to his father’s papers in 1889 or 1890 and asked him to write a biography which became The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson Lowe, Marston & Co., 1892). In “Writing Keats’s Last Days: Severn, Sharp, and Romantic biography” (Studies in Romanticism, March 22, 2003), Grant F. Scott corrected Elizabeth’s dates: “The project was initiated as many as five years before, in the summer of 1884. In a letter of 23 July 1884, Walter Severn responded to several Sharp’s queries and mentioned Ruskin’s agreement to contribute to the biography. In a later letter to Sharp, dated 19 November 1887, he also mentioned the ‘coming Life of my Father.’”
44 Having received Sharp’s manuscript of the Keats article and photocopies of two portraits of Keats, Robert Underwood Johnson had asked for revisions in the manuscript and wondered if Sharp could obtain photographs of other portraits of Keats. It turned out that Nigel Severn did have two other portraits and was willing to have them photographed.
45 Severn told Sharp he had a death mask that he would like Sharp to identify.
46 “July” and “1905” have been inserted in the manuscript letter.
47 Frederick Hollyer (1838–1933) was an English photographer and engraver known for his photographic reproductions of paintings and drawings, particularly those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and for portraits of literary and artistic figures of late Victorian and Edwardian London. Under the patronage of painter and sculptor Frederic Leighton, he began photographing paintings and drawings in the 1870s.
48 The friends may have been R. Murray Gilchrist and his partner, George Garfitt, who lived in Derbyshire and sometimes met Sharp in York.
49 The popular poet and novelist John Masefield (1878–1967) succeeded Robert Bridges as Poet Laureate in 1930. Among his works are Salt Water Ballads (1904); The Everlasting Mercy (1911); The Widow in the Bye Street (1912); and the autobiography In the Mill (1941). A Mainsail Haul, a collection of stories, was published in 1905.
50 Sharp wrote this letter in Nairn and sent it to Mary in Edinburgh to be transcribed. He placed Fiona in “the northern highlands” though not specifically in Nairn.
51 In 2013, currency of this amount would be at least £1500.
52 Here, Sharp conflated Fiona’s plans with his own. In the next sentence he had Fiona express relief that he has recovered from his “recent and prolonged illness.” Then she expresses her pleasure in the expectation that she will see much of Sharp in the fall and winter in France and Italy. This merging of William and Fiona geographically lends support to the assumption that Sharp told Mosher when they met in Boston the previous December that he and Fiona were, if not lovers, “dear friends.” It also indicates Sharp was not worried that Mosher would show up in France or Sicily with the expectation of meeting Fiona.
53 I have been unable to identify this individual.
54 According to E. A. S., her husband wrote and posted each year for his birthday a letter from W. S. to F. M. and a letter from F. M. to W. S. Aside from these two, I have seen only one other — a letter to W. S. from F. M. on September 12, 1897.
55 “To Fiona Macleod | Hills of Dreams | (by the Land under the Wave).”
56 “The Green World.”
57 “My dear twin.”
58 This poem was written between 1900 and 1905, and appeared in The Hour of Beauty, Songs and Poems (London: Thomas Mosher, 1907). See the “Life” section of this chapter for the poem and its implications.
59 In printing this letter, Elizabeth said it was addressed to an unknown friend. It responds to a letter from an unidentified sender, who praised and expressed an affinity with Fiona Macleod.
60 Helen Hopekirk (1856–1945) was an American pianist and composer who, in 1905, published Seventy Scottish Songs (Boston: Oliver Ditson and Company).
61 For many years Sharp had written a letter to Stedman in late September for him to receive on his birthday, October 8. This was the last of those birthday letters.
62 This is the last of many letters Sharp wrote for Stedman to receive on his birthday, October 8. Sharp had written to Stedman on July 30 to say he had just received a letter from Thomas Janvier, a mutual friend in New York, conveying the sad news that Stedman’s wife had died. The Stedmans entertained the Sharps in their home north of New York the previous November. Stedman died in January 1908.
63 Millicent Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, The Duchess of Sutherland (1867–1955) was a society hostess, social reformer, author, editor, journalist, and playwright. In 1884, on her seventeenth birthday, she was married to Lord Cromartie Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Marquess of Stafford, eldest son and heir of the 3rd Duke of Sutherland, who inherited the Duchy of Sutherland on his father’s death in 1892. An enthusiastic reader of the Fiona Macleod’s writings, she had sent Fiona a copy of her collection of short stories, The Winds of the World: Seven Love Stories (London: William Heineman, 1902).
64 This poem, entitled “In the Night,” first appeared in From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Other Poems (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1901).
65 This letter survives in three places: Sharp’s draft written on pages torn from a notebook that contain several notes Mary made to herself while copying it into the Fiona Macleod handwriting (Sharp Collection, National Library of Scotland), Mary’s faithful and beautifully written copy that was sent to Hopekirk (Pierpont Morgan Library), and excerpts from the letter Elizabeth included in the Memoir (pp. 407–09) which were copied from Sharp’s draft.
66 Fiona’s plans for the fall and winter reflect those of the Sharps, though they were able to go only as far as Sicily. They also demonstrate Sharp, as Fiona, gradually becoming reconciled (“turning westward”) to his waning health and the likelihood of an early death. After the turn of the century, as Elizabeth observed in the Memoir (pp. 423–24), the Fiona Macleod “literary expression” became increasingly intermingled with that of William Sharp.
67 This book was published as Where the Forest Murmurs: Nature Essays (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1906).
68 This sentence is from a letter to Catherine Janvier from Sharp which Catherine in turn quoted in a letter to Roselle Lathrop Shields on February 8, 1905. The woman whose love saved Sharp was Mrs. Shields. In her Memoir, Elizabeth describes the time they spent together in Greece in the winter of 1904: “With Spring sunshine and warmth my husband regained a degree of strength, and it was his chief pleasure to take long rambles on the neighboring hills alone, or with the young American archaeologist, Mrs. Roselle Lathrop Shields, a tireless walker” (p. 378). In her letter to Shields, Janvier promised to look through her surviving letters from Sharp for references to Shields and send them to her. She had found this single sentence and added “I cannot get at the earlier ones yet.” Janvier’s letter implies that Sharp had confided to her details of his relationship with and feelings for Shields he had not shared with Elizabeth. Janvier wrote that Sharp’s sentence about Shields occurred “In reference to our, your and mine, first meeting.” Where and when Janvier and Shields first met is unknown, but their first meeting probably occurred in London. For a detailed discussion of Janvier’s letter to Shields, see Appendix 2.
69 The Sharps had decided before leaving Florence for Sicily to give up their plans for North Africa (partly because of his ill health and partly for lack of finances) and spend a few months on the French Riviera where they hoped to meet Patrick Geddes.
70 Since the Sharps left Taormina for Maniace on November 27, they must have arrived in Taormina on or about November 20. This card was written from Florence just as they were about to leave the Lee-Hamiltons for Sicily.
71 Since the Sharps were in Italy in November, Mary Sharp may have forwarded the catalogue and books to Sharp to draft a letter of acknowledgement, or, more likely, Mary herself acknowledged them in the Fiona handwriting before forwarding them to Sharp.
72 Henry Gilbert (1868–1928) was the first American composition pupil of Edward MacDowell and the first composer of significance to recognize the possibility of an American school of composition springing out of the use of African-American musical compositions. In 1905, he composed the “Comedy Overture on Negro Themes.” In the same year, he also published, through the Wa-Wan Press in Newton Center, MA, musical settings of four poems, including one by Fiona Macleod.
73 Mrs. Sharp said this letter, like that dated December 8, was written to “a friend.” Both letters were written to Roselle Lathrop Shields. Since December 4 was a Monday and since Sharp’s diary shows he had been in Maniace since at least December 1, the trip from Taormina to Maniace took place on Monday, November 27. In her February 8, 1906 letter to Mrs. Shields, Catherine Janvier expressed her envy of Mrs. Shields having received several letters from Sharp after he went to Maniace. She says she received none written during the last month of his life though that was clearly not the case. It is the case that Sharp wrote more personally and at greater length to Roselle Shields.
74 An Alsatian painter, engraver, and sculptor, Paul Gustave Doré (1833–1883) is best known for his imaginative, dramatic, and often horrific illustrations. Among his most famous are those of the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Honoré de Balzac’s Contes drolatiques, the works of François Rabelais, and the Fables of Jean de la Fontaine. His best-known painting is Retreat from Moscow (1865).
75 From the Memoir and other correspondence, we know the Sharps spent most of October in Italy (Venice and Florence). In mid-November, they went on to Sicily where they stayed first in Taormina and then, beginning November 27, with Alexander Nelson Hood at Castle Maniace where Sharp died on December 12 and was buried two days later. This letter was written in early December, shortly after the Sharps had taken several modes of transportation up to Maniace, a journey Sharp described in detail in his December 4 letter to Roselle Lathrop Shields. The letter from Yeats to which Sharp was responding was written on November 4 and reached Sharp in Taormina on November 13. Sharp’s letter to Yeats was printed in Letters to Yeats I, pp. 155–57. It is transcribed here from a copy of the manuscript which was in the possession of Michael B. Yeats and is now in the National Library of Ireland.
76 This statement is crossed out in the letter.
77 In less than a week, on December 12, Sharp would be dead.
78 Sharp’s dream of Yeats may have been prompted by the ending of Yeats’s poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (“And pluck till time and times are done | The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun”) which appeared first in The Sketch on August 4, 1897 where it was called “A Mad Song,” and then with the new title in The Wind among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899).
79 Sharp’s diary entry for December 8, 1905 included: “Wrote a long letter to Robert Hichens, also to R.L.S” (Memoir, pp. 417–18). Elizabeth said this letter was written to the “same friend’ as that of the December 4 letter. The friend to whom both letters are addressed was R. L. S (Roselle Lathrop Shields).
80 “It is this sad illness, this ‘gout of the pen’ that Tourgenev (or Flaubert?) said broke his heart.”
81 Catherine Janvier said this letter, dated 9 December, a Saturday, was the last she had in Sharp’s handwriting. The sentence was preceded, she said, by a brief description of his illness (The North American Review, 5 April 1907, p. 731). Sharp died the following Tuesday.
82 Catherine Janvier said this letter, written the day before he died, was dictated (The North American Review, 5 April 1907, p. 731). Since this letter and that of December 9 were written in the days immediately preceding Sharp’s death, it is odd that she wrote to Roselle Lathrop Shields on February 9, 1906: “It always will be a bitter pain to me that he put off writing to me, so that I have nothing of any account after he went to Maniace. … How I envy you your four last letters — had I had but one! Well, I feel I know how he longed for his wee “Roseen.” How weary he was of many things. It breaks my heart to think of him there — alone — I know the best of care was taken of him, that every comfort was his, but I know that he was “alone,” he knew that too, I am sure, that it had to be” (private letter). Perhaps Mrs. Janvier considered her two December letters too short and not “of any account.” Alternatively, this letter and that of December 9 may not have been posted in Maniace and not delivered to her until after February 9, 1906. Sharp’s letters to Mrs. Shields, unlike those to Mrs Janvier, were more personal and expressive of his feelings. Since Elizabeth included portions of only two of Sharp’s four letters to Mrs. Shields from Maniace without identifying the recipient, the other two may have been withheld from her as too personal, perhaps too frank on expressing his love for his “wee Roseen.” In writing Sharp was alone when he died, Mrs. Janvier may have been trying to help Mrs. Shields deal with her loss. We know Elizabeth held him in her arms as he died, and Alex Hood was in the room.
83 In printing this letter, Elizabeth Sharp stated: “At the last realizing with deep regret that one or two of the friends he cared greatly for would probably feel hurt when they should know of the deception, he left the following note to be sent to each immediately on the disclosure of the secret”(Memoir, p. 422). The news of Sharp’s death was wired to Edith Rinder in London who sent it to several newspapers which published obituaries. Elizabeth sent Sharp’s confessionary note to at least two of his friends (George Russell and W. B. Yeats) in late December after she returned to London where she was staying with Edith and Frank Rinder.
84 This note is in Mrs. Sharp’s hand on mourning paper. The enclosed note is in Sharp’s hand on two sides of a small white card. The cards were written at Chorleywood when the Sharps rented rooms there in the fall of 1899. He was preparing for his death six years before it occurred and trying to help Elizabeth deal with the revelation that her husband was Fiona Macleod.
Appendix 2
1 This letter is now in my possession.
2 The title of the book — The Mews — has a double meaning: both cats and the alley ways, or mews, behind houses in Victorian London where horses were housed in stables. Most of those stables have been remodeled into residences. Catherine must have observed the many cats that inhabited the mews. The illustrations in her book dress the cats in many British uniforms and costumes.
3 “E” here and in the previous sentence is William Sharp’s wife, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp. “M” is probably Mary Sharp, William’s youngest sister, who provided the Fiona Macleod handwriting. “P” remains a mystery though it could be Mrs. J. H. Philpot, author of The Sacred Tree, or the Tree in Religion and Myth (London: Macmillan, 1897), with whom Sharp had been corresponding.
4 The “little article” Catherine Janvier was writing first came to light as a paper she read before the Aberdeen Branch of the Franco-Scottish Society on June 8, 1906. Revised and expanded, it was published as “Fiona Macleod and Her Creator William Sharp” in The North American Review, 184/612 (April 5, 1907), 718–32.
5 Thomas A. Janvier.