The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod". Volume 2: 1895-1899 E-Book

William F. Halloran

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

What an achievement! It is a major work. The letters taken together with the excellent introductory sections - so balanced and judicious and informative - what emerges is an amazing picture of William Sharp the man and the writer which explores just how fascinating a figure he is. Clearly a major reassessment is due and this book could make it happen.
—Andrew Hook, Emeritus Bradley Professor of English and American Literature, Glasgow University

William Sharp (1855-1905) conducted one of the most audacious literary deceptions of his or any time. Sharp was a Scottish poet, novelist, biographer and editor who in 1893 began to write critically and commercially successful books under the name Fiona Macleod. This was far more than just a pseudonym: he corresponded as Macleod, enlisting his sister to provide the handwriting and address, and for more than a decade "Fiona Macleod" duped not only the general public but such literary luminaries as William Butler Yeats and, in America, E. C. Stedman.
Sharp wrote "I feel another self within me now more than ever; it is as if I were possessed by a spirit who must speak out". This three-volume collection brings together Sharp’s own correspondence – a fascinating trove in its own right, by a Victorian man of letters who was on intimate terms with writers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, and George Meredith – and the Fiona Macleod letters, which bring to life Sharp’s intriguing "second self".

With an introduction and detailed notes by William F. Halloran, this richly rewarding collection offers a wonderful insight into the literary landscape of the time, while also investigating a strange and underappreciated phenomenon of late-nineteenth-century English literature. It is essential for scholars of the period, and it is an illuminating read for anyone interested in authorship and identity.

 

Leseprobe

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WILLIAM SHARP AND “FIONA MACLEOD” VOL. II

The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”

VOLUME II: 1895–1899

William F. Halloran

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2020 William F. Halloran

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Attribution should include the following information: William F. Halloran, The Life and Letters of William Sharp and “Fiona Macleod”. Volume 2: 1855–1894. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0196

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-869-3

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-870-9

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-871-6

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-872-3

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-873-0

ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-874-7

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0196

Cover image: “Mr William Sharp: from a photograph by Frederick Hollyer: The Chap-book, September 15, 1894”, Wikimedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Sharp_1894.jpg#/media/File:William_Sharp_1894.jpg

Cover design: Anna Gatti.

To the memory of

Noel and Rosemarie Sharp

and

Esther Mona Harvey

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter Twelve: January–June, 1895

11

Chapter Thirteen: July–December, 1895

71

Chapter Fourteen: January–June, 1896

141

Chapter Fifteen: July–December, 1896

215

Chapter Sixteen: 1897

283

Chapter Seventeen: 1898

357

Chapter Eighteen: January–June, 1899

417

Chapter Nineteen: July–December, 1899

483

Endnotes

527

List of Illustrations

613

Appendix

617

Acknowledgements

William Sharp’s wife and first cousin, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp, became his literary executor when he died in 1905. Upon her death in 1932, the executorship passed to her brother, Robert Farquharson Sharp. When he passed away in 1945, that role fell to his son, Noel Farquharson Sharp, who, like his father, was a keeper of printed books in the British Museum. When he died in 1978, the executorship fell to his wife, Rosemarie Sharp, who lived until 2011 when it passed to her son, Robin Sharp.

I am heavily indebted to Noel and Rosemarie Sharp for their assistance and friendship. They granted me permission to publish William Sharp’s writings and shared their memories of his relatives and friends. I am especially grateful to Noel Sharp for introducing me in 1963 to Edith Wingate Rinder’s daughter, Esther Mona Harvey, a remarkably talented woman whose friendship lasted until her death in 1993. Her recollections of her mother, who played a crucial role in the lives of William and Elizabeth Sharp, were invaluable.

Through many years of my involvement with an obscure and complex man named William Sharp, my wife — Mary Helen Griffin Halloran — has been endlessly patient, encouraging and supportive. This work has benefited greatly from her editorial skills.

I am also grateful to a succession of English graduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee who assisted me in transcribing and annotating William Sharp’s letters: Edward Bednar, Ann Anderson Allen, Richard Nanian, and Trevor Russell. Without the support I received from the College of Letters and Science and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee this project would not have seen the light of day.

The Appendix lists the institutions that have made copies of their Sharp/Macleod letters available and granted permission to transcribe, edit, and include them in this volume. It also lists the letters held by each institution. Without these libraries, their benefactors, and their competent staffs, a project of this sort — which has stretched over half a century — would have been impossible.

Finally, this project would not have come to fruition had it not been for Warwick Gould, Emeritus Professor and Founding Director of the Institute for English Studies at the University of London. It was he who supported the first iteration of the Sharp letters as a website supported by the Institute, and it was he who suggested Open Book Publishers as a possible location for an expanded edition of The Life and Letters of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. His support and friendship have been a beacon of light.

This is the second volume of a three-volume work which presents Sharp’s life from 1895 through 1899. The first volume rages from 1855, the year of his birth, through 1894; and the third from 1900 through 1905, the year of his death.

Introduction1

© William F. Halloran, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0196.09

William Sharp was born in Paisley, near Glasgow, in 1855. His father, a successful merchant, moved his family to Glasgow in 1867; his mother, Katherine Brooks, was the daughter of the Swedish Vice Consul in Glasgow. A talented, adventurous boy who read voraciously, he spent summers with his family in the Inner Hebrides where he developed a strong attachment to the land and the people. In the summer of 1863, his paternal aunt brought her children from London to vacation with their cousins. Months short of his eighth birthday, Sharp formed a bond with one of those cousins, Elizabeth Sharp, a bright girl who shared many of his enthusiasms. Their meeting led eventually to their engagement (in 1875) and their marriage (in 1884).

After finishing school at the Glasgow Academy in 1871, Sharp studied literature for two years at Glasgow University, an experience that fed his desire to become a writer. Following his father’s sudden death in August 1876, he fell ill and sailed to Australia to recover his health and look for suitable work. Finding none, he enjoyed a warm and adventurous summer and returned in June 1877 to London where he spent several weeks with Elizabeth and her friends. A year later he settled in London and began to establish himself as a poet, journalist, and editor. Through Elizabeth’s contacts and those he made among writers, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he became by the end of the 1880s a well-established figure in the literary and intellectual life of the city. During this decade he published biographical studies of Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Robert Browning; three books of poetry; two novels; many articles and reviews; and several editions of other writers. None of those publications brought the recognition he sought. By 1890 he had accumulated enough money to reduce his editing and reviewing and devote more time to poetry and prose.

That autumn he and Elizabeth went to Heidelberg for several weeks and then to Italy for the winter. In January, Edith Wingate Rinder, a beautiful young woman and the wife of Frank Rinder, accompanied her cousin by marriage, Mona Caird, a close girlhood friend of Elizabeth, on a three-week visit to Rome. There Edith spent many hours exploring the city and surrounding area with Sharp, who fell deeply in love with her. Inspired by the joy he felt in her presence and the warmth and beauty of the country, Sharp wrote and printed privately in Italy a slim book of poems, Sospiri di Roma, that exceeded in quality those he had written previously.

After returning to England in the spring of 1891 and under the influence of his continuing relationship with Edith, Sharp began writing a prose romance set in western Scotland. When he found a publisher (Frank Murray in Derby) for Pharais, A Romance of the Isles, he decided to issue it pseudonymously as the work of Fiona Macleod. In choosing a female pseudonym, Sharp signaled his belief that romance flowed from the repressed feminine side of his nature. The pseudonym also reflected the importance of Edith in the novel’s composition and substance. Their relationship is mirrored in the work’s depiction of a love affair doomed to failure. Finally, it disguised his authorship from London critics who, he feared, would not treat it seriously if it appeared as the work of the prosaic William Sharp.

Pharais changed the course of Sharp’s life. Along with The Mountain Lovers, another west of Scotland romance that followed in 1895, it attracted enthusiastic readers and favorable notices. When it became apparent that his fictional author had struck a sympathetic chord with the reading public and the books were bringing in money, Sharp proceeded to invent a life for Fiona Macleod and project her personality through her publications and letters. In letters signed William Sharp, he began promoting the writings of Fiona and adding touches to her character. He sometimes functioned as her agent. To some, he asserted she was his cousin, and he implied to a few intimate friends they were lovers. In molding the persona of Fiona Macleod and sustaining it for a decade, Sharp drew upon the three women he knew best: Elizabeth, his wife and first cousin; Edith Rinder, with whom he had developed a deep bond; and Elizabeth’s friend and Edith’s cousin, Mona Caird, a powerful and independent woman married to a wealthy Scottish Laird. He enlisted his sister Mary Sharp, who lived with their mother in Edinburgh, to provide the Fiona handwriting. His drafts of Fiona Macleod letters went to her for copying and mailing from Edinburgh.

For a decade before his death in 1905, he conducted through his publications and correspondence a double literary life. As Fiona, he produced poems and stories which, in their romantic content, settings, characters, and mystical aura, reflected the spirit of the time, attracted a wide readership, and became the principal literary achievement of the Scottish Celtic Renaissance. As Sharp, he continued reviewing and editing and tried his hand at several novels. As Fiona’s chief advocate and protector, he deflected requests for interviews by insisting on her desire for privacy. If it became known that he was Fiona, critics would dismiss the writings as deceptive and inauthentic. Destroying the fiction of her being a real woman, moreover, would block his creativity and deprive him of needed income. So he persisted and maintained the double life until he died. He refused to disclose his authorship even to the Prime Minister of England in order to obtain a much-needed Civil List pension. The popular writings of Fiona Macleod may have obtained Parliament’s approval, but not those of the journeyman William Sharp.

Sharp’s rugged good looks and exuberant manner obscured the fact that he had been ill since childhood. Scarlet fever in his youth and rheumatic fever as a young man damaged his heart. In his forties, diabetes set in, and attacks increased in frequency and seriousness. Given his declining health after the turn of the century, though interrupted by occasional bursts of exuberant creativity, his death in December 1905 was not a surprise to his family and close friends. It occurred while he and Elizabeth were staying with Alexander Nelson Hood, the Duke of Bronte, at his Castello Maniace on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily. Sharp is buried there in the estate’s Protestant Cemetery, where a large Celtic cross marks his grave.

Structure of the Volume

LIFE

The introductions to each chapter constitute a chronological biography that draws upon the letters and places them in context. The focus is on Sharp’s life; his writings are discussed only as they shed light on his daily comings and goings, his beliefs, his values, and his physical and mental condition. The letters reveal more than has previously been known about William Sharp, and he emerges from them as a unique individual who was talented, ambitious, determined to succeed as a writer, and aware of his shortcomings. He was immersed in the cross-currents of ideas and in the artistic and social movements of the last two decades of the nineteenth century in Great Britain and continental Europe. He participated in spiritualist efforts to affirm the existence of some form of life after death, and he embraced new ideas about the place of women in society, the constraints of marriage, the fluidity of gender identity, and the complexity of the human psyche. Those issues and many others are addressed in his letters and, often indirectly, in his writings. The Life sections of Life and Letters are not a comprehensive biography, but they are intended to provide, with the letters, the basis for more comprehensive studies of his life and work. They may also be of interest to scholars studying other individuals of the period and the issues in which they were involved.

LETTERS

Most of the letters transcribed, dated, and annotated were made available to the editor by libraries and private collectors throughout the world. They are of interest for what they reveal about Sharp, his correspondents, and the topics he addressed. He knew and corresponded with many influential writers, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and William Butler Yeats. He wrote extensively as William Sharp and as Fiona Macleod to the firms that published his books and to the editors of magazines, journals, and newspapers for which he wrote essays and reviews. Individuals interested in literary and publishing activities in Great Britain and the United States in the 1880s and 1890s may find the letters useful.

The Fiona Macleod letters contributed significantly to Sharp’s ability to maintain the fiction of her independent identity. When claims that he was the author emerged in print, he countered by pointing to the different handwriting. He also used the letters to move Fiona from place to place to avoid meetings with avid readers and skeptical journalists. Given her constant travels, it was convenient for her letters to be sent from and received at the address of a good friend she often visited in Edinburgh. It was the address of Sharp’s mother and his sister Mary, who supplied the handwriting for Fiona and who was always on guard against visitors seeking her.

Sharp also used the letters to create and mold the person or, more accurately, the persona of Fiona Macleod. Exercising his imagination and literary skills, he entered the consciousness of an imaginary woman and projected her convincingly to her correspondents. She was well-educated and steeped in Celtic lore. She was well-traveled and well-fixed. She had the good fortune to be sometimes the daughter and other times the wife — there were inconsistencies — of a wealthy Scotsman who owned a yacht that could whisk her away on a moment’s notice to the western isles, Iceland, or Scandinavia. She was shy and reclusive, but also firm in her decisions, formal in her manner, and resolved not to let herself be taken advantage of by publishers or diverted from her writing by newspaper reporters or suitors. She also had a sharp tongue which she exercised in correspondence when her privacy or integrity was in danger. She was particularly harsh in chastising those brash enough to suggest she was William Sharp.

The poems and stories Sharp published as Fiona Macleod exceed in quality and popularity those he wrote as William Sharp, but Fiona Macleod herself was his most impressive achievement. Her personality emerges in many stories that describe the people she met and the places she visited, and in dedications and prefatory notes in her books, but it is in the letters that Sharp brought her fully into being. Speaking directly as Fiona, he crafted her distinct personality. Initially a lark, she became a financial necessity. Enjoying the deception, he soon became entranced by the woman he was creating. He continued to embellish his creation to the point he could claim and sometimes believe she was a separate person inhabiting his body. His fictional creation became the perfect means for expressing a strand of his being that had its origin in his childhood summers in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. Cast in this light, the character who emerges in the Fiona letters and other writings is one of the most compelling and provocative literary creations of the 1890s.

FORMAT

The letters are divided chronologically into Chapters, and each Chapter begins with a biographical introduction. The letters have a uniform format:

Line one contains the name of the recipient and the date of composition. For undated letters, a date derived from a postmark, internal evidence, or context provided by other letters is placed in brackets. A question mark precedes questionable dates as [January ?12, 1892].

Line two states the place where the letter was written or from which it was mailed. Vertical marks denote line divisions in the original.

Line three contains the salutation if one exists.

Lines four and following contain the body of the letter with Sharp’s paragraphing preserved where it can be determined.

Following the body, a single line contains the complimentary close and signature separated by a vertical mark if the close and signature are separate lines in the original.

If the original contains postscripts, they follow the signature.

The form of the original manuscript and its location follow each letter in a separate line at lower left. When a letter has been transcribed from a printed source, that source is indicated. Most letters have been transcribed from the manuscripts or photocopies of the manuscripts provided by institutions and individuals. Their locations are identified, but any previous printings, with a few exceptions, are not identified.

Obvious errors of spelling are silently corrected. Errors of punctuation and grammar are corrected only when necessary to attain clarity of the author’s presumed intention. Notes on margins marked as inserts are placed within the body of the text at the point of intended insertion. Postscripts on margins follow the main body and signature. Every effort has been made to attain a balance between authenticity and readability. Sharp and his sister Mary sometimes omitted the comma after the salutation, and that inconsistency has been preserved in transcribing the letters.

The notes explain or clarify references. Given the multitude of people, places, literary and artistic works, and events mentioned in the letters, the process of annotation required editorial judgment about what is too much and what is not enough.

ABBREVIATIONS

Letters to Yeats

Letters to W. B. Yeats, Vols. I and II, ed. Richard Finnernan, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977)

E. A. S.

Elizabeth A. Sharp

E. C. S.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

E. W. R.

Edith Wingate Rinder

F. M.

Fiona Macleod

W. S.

William Sharp

Memoir

William Sharp (Fiona Macleod): A Memoir, compiled by his wife, Elizabeth A. Sharp (New York: Duffield & Co., 1910)

Middle Years

Katherine Tynan Hinkson, The Middle Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917)

Romantic ’90s

Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1926)

These abbreviations describe the form of the original letter:

AD

autograph draft

ALS

autograph signed letter

ACS

autograph lettercard signed

APS

autograph postcard signed

TL

typed letter

TLS

typed letter signed

Chapter Twelve

© William F. Halloran, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0196.01

Life: January–June, 1895

In January 1895 William Sharp wrote to a friend: “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, dream, true living.” The city was “a vast reservoir of all the evils of civilised life with a climate which makes me inclined to believe that Dante came here instead of to Hades.” Elizabeth said “the noise and confused magnetism of the great City weighed disastrously” on her husband. “The strain of the two kinds of work he was attempting to do, the immediate pressure of the imaginative work [by which she meant the work of Fiona Macleod] became unbearable, ‘the call of the sea,’ imperative” (Memoir, p. 242). To alleviate the crisis, the Sharps went to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight on January 6. Before they left, Sharp managed to write several letters. On January 1, he wrote to the editor of a Scottish paper recommending the publication of an article Frank Rinder had written about the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson, who died prematurely at the age of twenty-four in 1774. Rinder was an “able and promising young writer.” In fact, he was thirty-two — only seven years younger than Sharp — and was married to the woman Sharp loved.

On January 2 Sharp attended the funeral of Christina Rossetti and proposed to Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, an article about her similar to that which he wrote on Walter Pater in the December issue of Atlantic Monthly. Scudder accepted the suggestion, and Sharp’s “Some Reminiscences of Christina Rossetti” appeared in the July issue. He also asked Scudder if he would like an article on “The Celtic Renaissance,” which was a subject that was “becoming recognized as one of profound interest and indeed of paramount significance.” He was “a specialist in old and contemporary Scots-Irish Celtic literature,” and he would, of course, restrict himself to “the Celtic spirit: not to what is written in Scottish Gaelic or Irish Gaelic.” The new “Celtic movement in Ireland & Scotland, & in a less degree in Wales, is, in a word, of vital importance.” Sharp wanted to be part of that movement, and he hoped Fiona Macleod would be its dominant literary voice in Scotland.

On the other hand, in a letter to Catherine Janvier on January 5 he said he resented “too close identification” with the “so-called Celtic renaissance.” His work, if it were to survive, “must be beautiful in itself.” The main purpose of this letter was to tell Mrs. Janvier he was Fiona Macleod. He had no choice since she had recalled for him an August 1893 letter in which he said he was writing a romance called Pharais. Now he had to trust her to preserve his secret, which was known by only one or two others in Britain. He went on to say the book came from the “core of my heart,” and was “the beginning of my true work.” As he wrote it, his pen was “dipped in the ichor of my life.” More hopeful than accurate, he claimed the book had “reached people more than I dreamt of as likely” and “created a new movement” in Scotland. In England, it was hailed as a “work of genius” by the likes of George Meredith, Grant Allen, H. D. Traill, and Theodore Watts. It was “ignored in some quarters, abused in others, and unheeded by ‘the general reader,’” but Sharp was nonetheless “deeply glad with its reception.”

Mrs. Janvier’s curiosity about how Sharp came upon the name “Fiona Macleod” elicited his clearest explanation of its origin:

The name was born naturally: (of course I had associations with the name Macleod.) It, Fiona, is very rare now. Most Highlanders would tell you it was extinct — even as the diminutive of Fionnaghal (Flora). But it is not. It is an old Celtic name (meaning “a fair maid”) still occasionally to be found. I know a little girl, the daughter of a Highland clergyman, who is called Fiona.

He could not say more about Pharais without telling her about his whole life, but one day he would confide “some of the strange old mysteries of earlier days I have part learned, part divined, and other things of the spirit.” As Fiona Macleod he could write out of his heart in a way he could not do as William Sharp. Neither could he do so were he the woman Fiona Macleod was supposed to be “unless veiled in scrupulous anonymity.” He continued:

This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic ecstasy and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme verges of the common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and tyrannical as that need is… . My truest self, the self who is below all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts, emotions, and dreams, must find expression, yet I cannot save in this hidden way.

This explanation of his adoption of the pseudonym reproduced in part by Elizabeth Sharp in the Memoir is one of his most extensive and forthright. There is no mention of supernatural beings or of a separate person speaking through him, but simply a recognition of multiple personalities, or “selves,” within the single human being. The most basic of those he experienced could be expressed only by the adoption of the feminine pseudonym and by projecting a separate identity for a feminine hidden self. That the deeper self is female raises important questions concerning what is now called gender identity. These questions have plagued the reputation of William Sharp since his pseudonym was revealed upon his death in 1905. They have arisen earlier in this work, and will arise again later. Here it is enough to observe that possible answers to these questions lie in his recognition and the recognition of many of his contemporaries that men and women had the potential for multiple personalities, with different personalities achieving dominance at various stages of their lives.

The Sharps met Anna and Patrick Geddes in the fall of 1894, and the couple figured prominently in their lives as 1895 unfolded. There arose between Sharp and Geddes, according to Elizabeth,

a friendship with far-reaching results for “Fiona Macleod” […] Both were idealists, keen students of life and nature; cosmopolitan in outlook and interest, they were also ardent Celts who believed in the necessity of preserving the finer subtle qualities and the spiritual heritage of their race against the encroaching predominance of materialistic ideas and aims of the day (Memoir, pp. 248–49).

The Geddes lived in Dundee, where he was Professor of Botany at University College, and they were also active in the intellectual and social life of Edinburgh where, in 1887, Geddes established Scotland’s first student hostel and a summer school of arts, letters, and science. The summer school continued every August until 1899 and attracted students and scholars from Great Britain and the Continent. In 1894 he transformed a town mansion known as “Laird of Cockpen,” located near the Castle on the Edinburgh High Street, into the Outlook Tower, where he established the first “sociological laboratory” in the world. Best known for the camera obscura in its tower in which one can view a panorama of the city of Edinburgh, the building became the locus of the Scottish version of the Celtic Revival, and Geddes became the dominant figure in that revival. He fostered the movement as a means of furthering his ambition to restore Edinburgh as a major center of learning in Europe. The Celtic Renaissance article Sharp offered Horace Scudder for the Atlantic Monthly was one of a series of lectures Geddes asked Sharp to deliver in his Summer School in August, 1895. The lectures, as we will see, had an unfortunate result, but the invitation initiated a friendship between the two men and opened the way for significant contributions to the Celtic movement by Sharp as an editor and Fiona Macleod as a writer.

Fig. 1. Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Photograph by Lafayette, 30 December 1931. © National Portrait Gallery, London. Some rights reserved.

From Ventnor on January 10, Sharp asked Anna Geddes if she was surprised when her husband told her “W. S. and Fiona Macleod are one in the same person.” Since the Fiona writings were his “Celtic” credentials for taking part in the publishing firm Geddes was organizing, he had confided in Geddes and given him permission to share the secret with his wife. Sharp’s purpose in writing to Anna was to emphasize the need for “absolute preservation of the secret.” He had sent her a letter from Fiona, written in Fiona’s handwriting, before she was apprised of Fiona’s true identity. Now he wrote in his own handwriting and signed the letter, curiously, “Fiona Macleod and William Sharp.” This is a unique instance of the double signature in a letter and of the Fiona Macleod signature in a letter written in Sharp’s hand. Signing both names and asserting that W. S. and F. M. are one in the same implies the presence of two personalities in the same body. Sharp was trying to find a means of defining and describing the psychological phenomena he was experiencing. It is no wonder Elizabeth believed her husband’s frequent ailments were exacerbated by the strain of being two people, of appearing to the world as William Sharp while experiencing insights and feelings that found an adequate means of expression only through the female persona.

On January 15 Sharp wrote again to Patrick Geddes from Ventnor to say he thought he should go to Edinburgh to discuss details of the publishing firm and “Celtic matters.” They would be able to accomplish more in a day than in “months of correspondence.” The Sharps were returning to London on January 18 and would be fully occupiedthrough the weekend, but he might be able to get away on January 21 and spend the next two days in Edinburgh. He could ill afford the trip, but it seemed a necessity. Geddes replied he would come to London for the meeting, and Sharp wrote on January 21 to say he would keep the afternoon and evenings of January 29, 30, and 31 entirely free to talk with Geddes. The Sharp’s flat had only one bedroom, but he would arrange with a nearby friend — probably Mona Caird — a place for him to stay.

In his response to Sharp’s January 15 letter, Geddes suggested Sharp consider moving to Edinburgh to play a leading role in the publishing firm and avoid extensive travel back and forth between London and Edinburgh. In his January 21 letter Sharp said he found the idea tempting: “I have a profound & chronic distaste for London & London life and a nostalgia for the north.” The chief drawback of a move would be financial as a good deal of his income derived from reviewing London art exhibits and works of literature. Editors were less likely to ask for reviews beyond the London postal zone “partly on account of late transmissions & early return of proofs.” He doubted there was “publishing, secretarial, tutorial, or other work in Edinburgh that, without more expenditure of time and energy than I now give to my reviewing, would ensure me say £300 & leave me time for my own particular work.” In addition to the financial disadvantage of a permanent move to Edinburgh, the Sharps had “a great number of acquaintances and some dear friends” in London, and the city was a great meeting place, a “bazaar of fortunate & smiling chances.” Sharp mentioned his interest in “the Stage” and his “ambitions in that direction — &, I may add, Music, which is one of my wife’s chief joys.” He didn’t see how he could “throw up Fogtown — at present.” Perhaps he could have “rooms in Edinburgh (or the flat in Ramsey Gardens we want to take if possible […] and come & go a good deal: in fact, if the publishing idea develops, & you entrust me with a responsible part in it, I would need to be in Edinburgh for one week & perhaps two weeks in each month.” On the other hand, if his work for the Geddes publishing firm were to develop to the point where he could receive a guaranteed salary of £300 per year, the move might be possible as he would be glad to drop all his “miscellaneous pen-work.”

Having addressed his own situation and availability to take part in the new publishing venture, Sharp turned to the proposed firm and described at some length how he thought it should develop. “The effort,” he wrote, “should be to produce at first certain books of as pronounced a character as possible — books of significance so to say: so that the Firm be known at once for a certain distinction.” To help the firm get a good start, he suggested “a little Fortnightly,” like TheChap-Book Stone and Kimball was publishing in Chicago. Selling for only two pence, it was “attractive in itself and a splendid advt. of their wares.” He had given Geddes an issue of TheChap-Book that featured his photograph and an article publicizing the American edition of his Vistas. The fortnightly would require careful editing and handling, and Sharp would be glad to undertake it. Here, Geddes inserted “Agreed” on the letter. Sharp’s suggestion was the genesis of The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, a more elaborate publication, the first issue of which appeared in the spring of 1895.

Sharp went on to say the firm should engage in “no haphazard publishing at first”: “There might be, to start with, a biological book by A. Thomson: a sociological or other work by yourself: ‘A New Synthesis of Art’ or other work by myself […] a Celtic romance by Fiona Macleod […] (for it is on Celtic lines, I think, the most development will take place first).” He estimated the firm would need an initial outlay of about £1,000; authors would be paid on a royalty system. As for his own involvement,

If you intend me to be the literary “boss” in the firm (tho’ perhaps I mistake your intent!) I would give my best thought, care, & experience to making the venture a success in every way, & ultimately a potent factor in the development of Scotland & of Edr [Edinburgh] in particular. Of course, my editorial experiences, & far-reaching literary connections, would stand me in good stead: & in a year or so we could have a varied and potent “staff.”

Sharp was thinking very grandly as he continued, “If I were lity. ‘boss,’ as I say, one effort would be to centralise in Edinburgh all the Celtic work now being done by Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers.” Capital would be needed to “grease the wheels” and then “patience” and “wise discretion.” Here Geddes again wrote, “Agreed.” There is always room at the “top of the tree,” Sharp asserted, and “We are too enthusiastic, too determined, not to get to that top if it be possible, as I firmly believe it is, and as I know you do.” To this statement, Geddes gave his final blessing: “Quite so. Full speed ahead!” Sharp concluded by apologizing for writing “so scrappy and unsatisfactory a note,” but said the writing of it moved him out of his “depression & ‘doleful dumps.’” This letter must have provided the basis for their discussion in London as Geddes noted his agreement with many of Sharp’s suggestions and moved ahead with them without involving Sharp. He must have sensed Sharp’s inability to stay focused for long on the practical details of management.

In early February 1895, Sharp was putting the finishing touches on the second Fiona Macleod romance, The Mountain Lovers, which John Lane published in the summer. He was also writing Fiona Macleod stories for a volume called The Sin-Eater and Other Tales which was published in November of 1895 by the Geddes firm in Edinburgh and by Stone and Kimball in Chicago. He was corresponding with Herbert Stone as Fiona about that volume and other possible Fiona publications and as William Sharp about a collection of short stories entitled The Gypsy Christ and Other Tales which Stone and Kimball published, also in 1895. The combination of writing fiction and arranging for publications negatively affected Sharp’s health. Elizabeth Sharp recalled an incident that brought home to her the seriousness of his condition.

A telegram had come. I took it to his study. I could get no answer. I knocked, louder, then louder, — at last he opened the door with a curiously dazed look in his face. I explained. He answered, “Ah, I could not hear you for the sound of the waves!” It was the first indication to me, in words, of what troubled him (Memoir, pp. 242–43).

He was troubled by “the noise and confused magnetism of the great City” and his estrangement from the sea. Since there were no waves to be heard in London, he soon left for the West of Scotland.

In a February 13 letter to Herbert Stone, Sharp reported that he was going to Edinburgh at the weekend where he would see Fiona Macleod. On February 18 he would go to Corrie on the western island of Arran. He described his arrival in a letter to Elizabeth the next day:

It was a most glorious sail from Ardrossan. The sea was a sheet of blue and purple washed with gold. Arran rose like a dream of beauty. I was the sole passenger in the steamer, for the whole island! What made the drive of six miles more beautiful than ever was the extraordinary, fantastic beauty of the frozen waterfalls and burns caught as it were in the leap. Sometimes these immense icicles hung straight and long, like a Druid’s beard: sometimes in wrought sheets of gold, or magic columns and spaces of crystal. Sweet it was to smell the pine and the heather and bracken, and the salt weed upon the shore. The touch of dream was upon everything, from the silent hills to the brooding herons by the shore.

“In that exquisite solitude,” he continued, “I felt a deep exaltation grow. The flowing of the air of the hills laved the parched shores of my heart.” Arran brought a dramatic improvement in his mental condition, and the sea and the quiet majesty of the cold landscape released his creative impulses. The William Sharp who wrote this letter was deeply hidden from the world of London editing and publishing. He wrote vividly, compellingly, directly, and with no invocation of a feminine persona.

Years later, Sharp retold the story of this 1895 visit to Arran in an essay called “Earth, Fire, and Water” which appeared in Fiona Macleod’s The Divine Adventure: Iona; By Sundown Shores (1900). After repeating several tales about men who were called to the sea by hearing the sound of waves, the narrator continued:

I have myself in lesser degree, known this irresistible longing. I am not fond of towns, but some years ago I had to spend a winter in a great city. It was all-important to me not to leave during January; and in one way I was not ill-pleased, for it was a wild winter. But one night I woke, hearing a rushing sound in the street — the sound of water. I would have thought no more of it, had I not recognized the troubled noise of the tide, and the sucking and lapsing of the flow in weedy hollows. I rose and looked out. It was moonlight, and there was no water. When, after sleepless hours, I rose in the grey morning I heard the splash of waves. All that day and the next I heard the continual noise of waves. I could not write or read; at last I could not rest. On the afternoon of the third day the waves dashed up against the house. I said what I could to my friends and left by the night train. In the morning we (for a kinswoman was with me) stood on the Greenock Pier waiting for the Hebridean steamer, the Clansman, and before long were landed on an island, almost the nearest we could reach, and one that I loved well. We had to be landed some miles from the place I wanted to go, and it was a long and cold journey. The innumerable little waterfalls hung in icicles among the mosses, ferns, and white birches on the roadside. Before we reached our destination, we saw a wonderful sight. From three great mountains, their flanks flushed with faint rose, their peaks white and solemn, vast columns of white smoke ascended. It was as though volcanic fires had once again broken their long stillness. Then we saw what it was: the north wind (unheard, unfelt, where we stood) blew a hurricane against the other side of the peaks, and, striking up the leagues of hard snow, drove it upward like smoke, till the columns rose gigantic and hung between the silence of the white peaks and the silence of the stars.

That night, with the sea breaking less than a score yards from where I lay, I slept, though for three nights I had not been able to sleep. When I woke, my trouble was gone.

The word painting of this passage is precise and moving; it illustrates the beauty Sharp could achieve when he dropped his defenses and wrote from his heart. In this passage he recalls the peace that came to him in February 1895 when he escaped from London to the Isle of Arran. The incident itself and his description of it in the letter to his wife had germinated and evolved into a striking and controlled passage of poetic prose. Does Fiona Macleod, the supposed author of “Earth, Fire and Water,” enter the picture? The short answer is no. While there are subtle efforts to feminize the narrative voice earlier and later in the essay, none appear in this passage.

Elizabeth directly addressed the issue: “Although the essay is written over the signature of ‘Fiona Macleod’ and belongs to that particular phase of work, nevertheless it is obviously ‘William Sharp’ who tells the story, for the ‘we’ who stood on the pier at Greenock is himself in his dual capacity; his ‘kinswoman’ is his other self.” Sharp sometimes believed — and often encouraged his wife to believe — he was two separate people, one male and one female. In the 20 February letter of 1895, after telling Elizabeth he was alone on the ferry to Arran, he wrote, “There is something of a strange excitement in the knowledge that two people are here: so intimate and yet so far-off. For it is with me as though Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening for her step sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door. It is unawaredly that she whispers to me. I am eager to see what she will do — particularly in The Mountain Lovers. It seems passing strange to be here with her alone at last.” It was one thing to be William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, two people in one body, and in full control of both. It was quite another to claim to have no control over a second self that flourished within him. The implied separation of his creative imagination is unique and remarkable.

When Sharp objectified the Fiona persona as a separate person entirely free of control by the man the world knew as William Sharp, he was often describing not simply a creature of his imagination but a real person. The kinswoman who accompanied him to Arran in mid-winter 1895, stood on the pier with him, and was sleeping in the next room, may have been not the imaginary woman, Fiona Macleod, but the woman he loved, Edith Wingate Rinder. Ever kind and generous, Elizabeth wrote of Mrs. Rinder:

Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race.

Sharp wrote to his wife of Edith Rinder in 1896: “to her I owe my development as ‘Fiona Macleod,’ […] without her there would have been no Fiona Macleod” (Memoir, p. 222).

One can speculate endlessly about the psychological interaction between Sharp and Edith that enabled him to produce the writings of Fiona Macleod, but it is impossible to define it precisely. It shifted over time, and even the Sharps, who described it variously, failed to understand it. Near the end of 1895, in writing to his friend Sir George Douglas, for example, Sharp called Fiona Macleod a “puzzling literary entity.” The previous January, we recall, he told Catherine Janvier, “My truest self, the self who is below all other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts, emotions and dreams, must find expression, yet I cannot save in this hidden way.” We know Sharp and Edith were deeply in love for many years. It was she who enabled him to drop his defenses, release his deepest “self,” exercise most fully his creative imagination. He claimed he could become Fiona Macleod — and thus write most easily as Fiona Macleod — only when he and Edith were alone together. It sometimes appears he was using his need to be away from the city, his need for solitude, as an excuse to be alone with Edith. The build-up of frustration that preceded his escape to the West of Scotland in February 1895 and again in June of that year may have been, at least partially, a build-up of sexual tension. The sense of relief and renewal in his February 20 letter to Elizabeth and later in a June 4 letter to Geddes is palpable.

By March third, Sharp was back in London writing again to Geddes, this time with a detailed proposal for a quarterly which would be used as a vehicle for stories, articles, poems and visual art and as a means of advertising the firm’s other publications. He had in mind “a thoroughly representative Anglo-Celtic ‘quarterly’” that would be “well-supported” in all the big towns of Great Britain and America and draw “Anglo-Celtic writers to look to Edinburgh.” He enclosed a draft of what he thought the first number should contain and volunteered to be its editor (with the help of his wife). Drawing on his London connections, he would assemble a strong list of contributors, and he envisioned the quarterly as “a valuable record” of the entire Celtic Revival. The quarterly would be entitled “The Celtic World.” Rather than naming an editor, it should say only: “Published by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues” or “Edited and Published in Edinburgh.” He outlined a possible Table of Contents for a “Summer Number” that included items by the most notable Irish, English, Welsh, and Scottish Celticists: W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, Patrick Geddes, Katherine Tynan, George Russell (AE), and, of course, Fiona Macleod among them, and a Frontispiece and Celtic Ornament by John Duncan. Sharp was planning expansively.

Geddes took the idea of a quarterly issued as a book and implemented it quickly and more restrictively. He ignored Sharp’s offer of himself as editor, began correspondence with T. Fisher Unwin in London to arrange for distribution, and produced not a summer issue, as suggested by Sharp, but a Spring issue called simply The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal. Thiswould be followed, in accordance with Sharp’s suggestion, by Summer, Fall and Winter issues. Geddes asked William Macdonald, an aspiring poet, to assemble and oversee the publication of the volume. The volume began with a seven-page “Proem” signed by Macdonald and J. Arthur Thomson, a biologist and a friend of Geddes which clearly set forth Patrick Geddes’s ideas for reforming not only Edinburgh’s Old Town, but the industrialized cities of Britain and the world. It equated the decadence that pervades literature and the arts with the decay of cities and asserted there were signs of a New Birth “against the background of Decadence.”

The music of the coming Renascence is heard so far only in “broken snatches,” but in these snatches four chords are sounded, which we would fain carry in our hearts — That faith may be had still in the friendliness of fellows; that the love of country is not a lost cause; that the love of women is the way of life; and that in the eternal newness of every Child is an undying promise for the Race.

In those words, one hears the distinctive voice of Patrick Geddes filtered through the voice of the aspiring poet William Macdonald.

The content of the Spring volume was divided into four sections: “Spring in Nature,” “Spring in Life,” “Spring in the World,” and “Spring in the North.” Each story, poem, and essay touches on the theme of renewal. The authors are not the luminaries of the larger Celtic renaissance proposed by Sharp, but Scots largely unknown today — except, of course, Patrick Geddes, who contributed two essays (“Life and its Science” and “The Scots Renascence”), and William Sharp, who contributed one short poem under his own name and two poems and a story (“The Anointed Man”) as Fiona Macleod. Celtic designed Headpieces and Tailpieces appear throughout the volume which was printed by Constable in Edinburgh on fine paper. Some copies were produced with tan leather bindings and a full-page design on the front cover embossed in green. There are several full-page drawings, the finest by John Duncan, the principal visual artist of the Scottish revival, one of which (“Apollo’s School-Days”) shows the influence of Aubrey Beardsley.

Fig. 2. “Apollo’s School Days,” John Duncan, in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, The Book of Spring (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes and Colleagues, 1895). Photograph by William F. Halloran (2020) of his copy formerly owned by Lady Mears, Patrick Geddes’ daughter.

In a letter to Geddes dated May 15, Sharp said he liked much of what was in the Spring volume, but some of it lacked “distinctiveness as well as distinction.” It was promising and with “careful piloting” should “come to stay.” He read Geddes’s two contributions “with particular interest and pleasure, not only with the affection of a friend but with the sangfroid of a critic.” The poetry in the volume, including that of Fiona Macleod, did not seem as good as the prose. The editorial control, he wrote, “must be more exigent.” And the illustrations, he thought, perilously weak: “With the exception of Duncan’s “Apollo’s School Days” & some of the head-pieces, there is not a drawing […] which is not crude in draughtsmanship and in design — or in one or two instances frankly meaningless!” He thought John Duncan’s “Anima Celtica” weakly imitative and lacking in any redeeming features. Sharp judged this kind of work as “the mere dross and debris of the ‘fin-de Siècle’ ebb,” stating that it had “the same effect on one’s optic nerves as a scraping nail has on one’s auditory ditto.” He expected much adverse criticism of the volume because of its art; “the Yellow Book drawings are at least clever if ultra-fin-de-Siècle, while the majority of these of TheEvergreen are fin-de-Siècle without being clever.” Perhaps he was too severe in his criticism, but he felt so strongly “that a really valuable & significant future awaits the ‘Evergreen’ if it preserve & develop its best, in literature & art, & disengage itself from what is amateurish, that it seems worthwhile to be severely exigent.”

The second volume of The Evergreen appeared in the fall of 1895, the third (Summer) and the fourth (Winter) in 1896. Though Sharp was not named editor, his critique had the effect of improving the quality of the later volumes. In a note called “Envoy” at the close of the fourth volume Patrick Geddes and W. Macdonald announced the end of the first series and declared the need to take some seasons off before producing a second series. Since the publication was without an editor and invited authors were free to contribute as they wished, The Evergreen reflected Geddes’s effort to create an artistic commune in the Outlook Tower and its surrounding buildings, in which writers, visual artists, and scientists would live together happily stimulating each other’s creativity. According to the “Envoy,” the artists and scientists now recognized the need to go off on their own and do their own work before coming together in a new synthesis. The Evergreen was not revived.

Fig. 3. The Outlook Tower, Castlehill, Edinburgh. Photograph by Kim Traynor (2013), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Outlook_Tower,_Castlehill,_Edinburgh.JPG#/media/File:Outlook_Tower,_Castlehill,_Edinburgh.JPG

In early April Sharp wrote a long letter to Herbert Stone complaining that he had not received the proof sheets for The Gypsy Christ though they had been promised in February. Moreover, Fiona Macleod was upset for not having heard from him about the agreement to publish an American edition of Pharais. Sharp was beginning to have doubts that Stone and Kimball would be a reliable American publisher of his books. It was an early sign that stresses had begun to develop between the two young publishers. In fact, Melville Stone — Herbert’s father and the publisher of the Chicago Daily News — who supported the publishing venture was beginning to wonder if it would develop into a viable business.

In mid-April Sharp went to Paris to cover a salon for the Glasgow Herald. Back in London on April 27, he apologized to Geddes for not having time in Paris to look up Thomas Barclay, a Scottish barrister specializing in international law, and ask him to support Geddes’s scheme to create a Franco-Scottish College somewhere in France. He promised to contact Barclay when he was back in Paris on May 5, this time with his wife, to review another salon.

Prior to the second Paris visit, he wrote another long letter to Geddes (April 29) that described an elaborate plan for the Geddes’s firm’s book publications. He planned to be in Scotland around May 20 and would stay with the Geddes in Dundee for a few days to confer “about the publishing business.” The two men had come to an arrangement, perhaps during Geddes’s late January visit to London, for Sharp to oversee the publication of books, and his April 29 letter was filled with proposals for them to discuss in person. Sharp thought that a volume of short stories by Fiona Macleod (The Sin-Eater and Other Stories) should beone of the firm’s “start-off books.”He explained that short stories of the kind were in demand at that time, and its sales should be helped by the appearance of Fiona’s second romance, The Mountain Lovers, in June. Geddes must have had Sharp’s letter on hand when the two met in Dundee as Geddes noted in its margin “Press for July” and then “Agreed 23/5/5/ for the Autumn.”

Lyra Celtica would also be ready for publication in the fall. Though Sharp was the primary editor of the volume, he wrote on April 29 that its editor of record will be not F. M. or W. S., but Elizabeth Sharp. This was advisable “for several reasons (one among them, the inclusion of F. M.’s runes & Celtic lyrics).” Sharp, however, would write a “critical introductory essay (as distinct from an ordinary preface).” This book, “though mainly Scottish-Celtic and Irish Celtic,” would contain “representative pieces by Breton (trs), Cornish, & Welsh, & Manx poets.” Sharp suggested that the firm’s first book be an “R. L. S. volume” — that is, a volume either about or by Robert Louis Stevenson — followed by a romance composed by “a well-known Man.” Here Geddes wrote in the margin “Mrs. Mona Caird — Agreed 23/5/5.” Though not a man, Mona Caird was well-known as an advocate for the rights of women, especially for granting women equal legal rights within the marriage contract. Geddes’s marginal note raises the interesting prospect that Mona Caird, who, in 1894, had published her ground-breaking novel, The Daughters of Danaus, was working on or had in mind a romance. Neither the Stevenson book nor a Mona Caird romance was published by the Geddes firm. Sharp also proposed a series of short books of fiction, perhaps called “The Evergreen Series,” and a “Cosmopolitan Series” containing translations of works by “foreign authors of marked power & distinction in the ‘new movement’ — a vague phrase that really means little save the onward wave of the human mind.” He listed no fewer than fourteen authors from six countries, including the United States. Finally, he thought it best to leave until 1896 the publication of a book called The Literary Ideal, which would contain the lectures he planned to deliver in August in Geddes’s Summer School. Geddes wisely wrote in the margin “Discuss in August,” as he wanted to see the lectures before agreeing to publish them.

Though few of the ideas proposed in this letter materialized, Sharp served briefly as Manager of Patrick Geddes and Colleagues and, when that proved impracticable, as its Literary Adviser. Under his guidance the firm produced several beautifully designed books — authored by William Sharp, his wife, and his friends — that rival in design and format those published by established firms in London and Dublin for the Irish contingent of the Celtic Revival. Under Sharp’s guidance, the firm became the principal vehicle for publishing his own writings under the guise of Fiona Macleod, who became, according to an article in The Irish Independent, “the most remarkable figure in the Scottish Celtic Renascence.” The Sin-Eaterand Other Tales appeared in the fall of 1895 and The Washer of the Ford in 1896. Also, in 1896, the firm issued Fiona’s From the Hills of Dream (1896), a collection of poems that was published in multiple editions. In 1897, when Sharp was no longer Literary Director, the firm issued Fiona’s Songs and Tales of St. Columba and His Age and The Shorter Stories of Fiona Macleod, a rearrangement and reissue in three inexpensive paper-covered volumes of the stories published in The Sin-Eater and The Washer of the Ford. Lyra Celtica and the first two Fiona Macleod books appeared in a series Sharp called “The Celtic Library.”

Lyra Celtica was the firm’s most successful publication, with several editions published, beginning in 1896. As proposed in Sharp’s April letter, it was compiled and edited by Elizabeth Sharp, with a lengthy introduction and copious notes written by Sharp. The series also included, in 1896, The Fiddler of Carne: A North Sea Winter’s Tale, a Welsh romance set in the late eighteenth century by Sharp’s friend Ernest Rhys, and, in 1897, The Shadow of Arvor; Legendary Romances and Folk-Tales of Brittany, translated and retold by none other than Edith Wingate Rinder. The binding of the latter volume was among the most beautiful of the series.

Fig. 4. The Shadow of Arvor: Legendary Romances and Folk-Tales of Brittany, Translated and Retold by Edith Wingate Rinder (Edinburgh: Patrick Geddes & Colleagues, 1897). Printed by W. H. White and Co. Ltd., Edinburgh Riverside Press. Photograph by William F. Halloran (2019).

The Rhys and Rinder books exemplify Sharp’s desire to have the firm represent more than Scottish Gaeldom by introducing tales from Wales and Brittany. Neither Patrick Geddes nor William Sharp were well organized businessmen, and the firm soon descended into financial insolvency. Sharp’s efforts to sustain the writing and publication of his dual-authorship, his frequent bouts of ill-health and depression, and his inability to remain for long in one place placed a strain on his relationship with the individuals Geddes enlisted to try to save the firm. Geddes was endlessly patient with Sharp and concerned with his well-being. Their close friendship produced a great deal in a brief period, but the strain ultimately became too great, and they gradually parted ways, with Geddes’s interests expanding into town planning on a grand scale.

Sharp went to York on May 18, spent two nights there with his friend George Cotterell, editor of the Yorkshire Herald, and visited the Geddes home in Dundee on May 20. On May 23, he left for a long weekend of relaxation in the West of Scotland. During their brief visit Geddes became concerned about the state of Sharp’s physical and mental well-being. He wrote to Elizabeth Sharp to ask her opinion about her husband’s health and to propose the possibility of the publishing firm providing him a stipend for the work he would do. This would also enable him to spend less time on reviewing, and more time on his poetry and fiction. In a late May response, Elizabeth expressed her deep appreciation for Geddes’s concern and generosity. She was thankful to have someone else who “sees how he is expending health and strength — and encroaching on his reserve — in work of a kind he ought not to do.” She continued:

Like you, I have a great belief in the future of W. S. and Fiona M., and I am equally persuaded that he must give up the fretting hack-work in order to give his real work its chance. But it is so difficult to make him do so; he grows nervous, and, I regret to say, chiefly on my account. But I feel sure, that now, your kind interest in him, and thought for him will do more [than] anything else to make him, not only feel, but act on our advice — which coincides. You are indeed a most valuable ally.