William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir Compiled by His Wife Elizabeth A. Sharp

“After Rossetti’s death, I wrote,” William Sharp has related, “to the commission of Messrs. Macmillan, a record of his achievements in the two arts of literature and poetry, my...

April my husband spent in the West of Scotland, for which he pined; and on his way North broke his journey in Edinburgh whence he wrote to Mr. W. J. Robertson, the translator in...

The most important influence in the early literary career of the young poet was his friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He gained not only a valued friend, who introduced hi...

Our summer was spent on Arran, Colinsay, and on “the Green Isle” of Lismore in the sea-mouth of Loch Linnhe within sight of the blue hills of Morven. We had rooms in the Ferryma...

The summer of 1893 was hot and sunny: and we delighted in our little garden with its miniature lawns, its espalier fruit trees framing the vegetable garden, and its juvenile but...

The Directors of The Fine Art Society decided finally not to organise the special department of Engravings of which William Sharp hoped to take charge, therefore his engagement...

Winter in Rome was one long delight to the emancipated writer. It amply fulfilled even his optimistic anticipation. He revelled in the sunshine and the beauty; he was in perfect...

My second meeting with my cousin was in August of 1875, when he spent a week with us at a cottage my mother had taken at Dunoon, then one of the most charming villages on the Cl...

1885 was a year of hard work. It was our desire that such work should be done that should eventually make it possible for my husband to devote himself exclusively to original wo...

The brilliant summer was followed by a damp and foggy autumn. My husband’s depression increased with the varying of the year. While I was on a visit to my mother he wrote to me,...

New Year’s Day found us at Palermo where my husband was enchanted at being presented with a little pottle of freshly gathered wild strawberries; a week later we traversed the is...

To William Sharp, as to many others, the closing days of 1899 brought a deep personal sorrow in the death of Robert Browning. The younger man had known him for several years, an...

The three years spent at Wescam were happy years, full of work and interest. Slowly but steadily as health was re-established, the command over work increased, and all work was...

In the summer of 1885 we went to Scotland and looked forward to an idyllic month on West Loch Tarbert. While staying with Mr. Pater in Oxford my husband had seen the advertiseme...

“How the man subdivided his soul is the mystery,” wrote Mr. James Douglas. And in trying to suggest an answer I would say with “F. M.”—“I write, not because I know a mystery and...

During the most active years of the Fiona Macleod writings, the author was usually in a highly wrought condition of mental and emotional tension, which produced great restlessne...

It is not the night-winds in sad hearts only that I hear, or the sighing of vain fatalities: but, often rather, of an Emotion akin to that mysterious Sorrow of Eternity in love...

“London I do not like, though I feel its magnetic charm, or sorcery. I suffer here. The gloom, the streets, the obtrusion and intrusion of people, all conspire against thought,...

... I am so glad I went down to see George Meredith to-day. It was goodbye, I fear, though the end may not be for some time yet: not immediate, for he has recovered from his rec...

Various titles had been discarded, among others “The Reddening of the West,” also “The Sun-Treader” intended for a story, projected but never written, to form a sequel to “The H...

a keen love of the country, and especially of the West Highlands. Every summer he took a house for three or four months on the shores of the Clyde, or on one of the beautiful se...

On the wanderer’s return to England his volume of poems _From the Hills of Dream_ was published by P. Geddes & Coll. The first edition was dedicated to our godson Arthur Allhall...

The production of the Fiona Macleod work was accomplished at a heavy cost to the author as that side of his nature deepened and became dominant. The strain upon his energies was...

Many schemes were mentally cartooned for the autumn and winter’s work; but all our plans were suddenly upset by an unlooked for occurrence. While in Rome I had had a severe atta...

For the January number of _The Fortnightly Review_ for 1899 “Fiona” wrote a long study on “A Group of Celtic Writers” and what she held to be “the real Celticism.” The writers s...

In the Spring of 1889 the Chair of Literature at University College, London, became vacant on the death of Professor Henry Morley; and many of William Sharp’s friends urged him...

Owing to the publication of _The Sin-Eater_ by a firm identified with the Scoto-Celtic movement the book attracted immediate attention. Dr. Douglas Hyde voiced the Irish feeling...

which Stone and Kimball have given me good terms—_Wives in Exile_—that it is “quite unlike anything else—at once the most brilliant, romantic, and witty thing I have read for lo...

“That man is fortunate who has half his desires gratified, who lives to see half his desires accomplished,” says Schopenhauer, and taking the axiom to be true I am not going bac...

“_But one to whom life appeals by myriad avenues, all alluring and full of wonder and mystery, cannot always abide where the heart most longs to be. It is well to remember that...