The Life and Letters of William Sharp and "Fiona Macleod". Volume 3: 1900-1905 E-Book

William F. Halloran

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

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. III

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

VOLUME III: 1900–1905

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 3: 1900–1905. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0221

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800640054

ISBN Hardback: 9781800640061

ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800640078

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800640085

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800640092

ISBN Digital (XML): 9781800640108

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0221

Cover image: William Sharp from a photograph by Frederick Hollyer in 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.

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter Twenty: 1900

11

Chapter Twenty-One: 1901

67

Chapter Twenty-Two: 1902

135

Chapter Twenty-Three: 1903

193

Chapter Twenty-Four: 1904

251

Chapter Twenty-Five: 1905

313

Afterword

397

Appendix 1

405

Appendix 2

409

Endnotes

415

List of Illustrations

467

To the memory of

Noel and Rosemarie Sharp

and

Esther Mona Harvey

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 third and final volume of The Life and Letters of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. The first volume presents Sharp’s life from 1855, the year of his birth, through 1894; the second from 1895 through 1899; 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.0221.09

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 Twenty

© William F. Halloran, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0221.01

Life: 1900

On 3 January 1900, Sharp wrote a letter to Nellie Allen from Chorleywood and enclosed a copy of the poem he had written and delivered at the December meeting of the Omar Khayyam Club. In the poem he alluded to her husband, and in his preliminary remarks he called Grant Allen “a fine writer and true-hearted man” whose death was a loss to his many friends and to the club. Both Sharps looked forward to seeing Nellie again as soon as she vacated The Croft in Hindhead and settled in London. On January 8, he wrote a long letter to Edith Lyttelton who had come under the spell of the Fiona writings. It demonstrates his use of Fiona to foster a friendship with a member of the aristocracy, herself an aspiring writer. He was sorry to hear she had been ill through much of the fall. He had also been ill, he confided, and was determined not “to spend another midwinter in this damp & sunless climate.” He asked if she had written anything lately and declared that Fiona, having sampled her earlier work, felt assured she “could, and probably some day soon would, write a notable book.” Fiona’s new book, The Divine Adventure, would be published in March by Chapman & Hall. The book’s title was also the title of its long titular essay which had appeared in the recent November and December issues of Chapman & Hall’s Fortnightly Review. The book, he wrote, will be “personal” and “autobiographical,” unlike anything Fiona has produced. As for William Sharp, he was “at work every available hour on a commissioned ‘History of the Fine Arts in the Nineteenth Century’ — a kind of synthesis, or coup d’oeil perhaps, of the dominating features and interrelated developments of modern art.” He concluded by asking Mrs. Lyttelton to join him the following Monday for tea and a chat at his club, the Grosvenor Club, or if she preferred, he could come to her.

In these letters of early January Sharp seemed quite happy, but his cheerfulness soon turned to gloom. During the warm and sunny fall he enjoyed life in Chorleywood, but as winter set in he began to tire of country life and rue the travel in and out of London in foul weather. In early February, he had to tell Theodore Watts-Dunton he could not repay the loan of £25 he had received in November. His letter of February 9 casts a revealing light on both the state of his health and the medical issues people faced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

I know you will be sorry to hear that since Christmas I have had a bad time of it. First, I got influenza again, with pneumonic complication — then an inflammatory condition of the veins was set up — & thro’ that & an accident on the railway I started a bad varicose vein, badly strained, & constantly threatening a clot (phlebitis) — laming me as though I had the gout! — & keeping me to the house for weeks. Then a very painful & prostrating meningeal neuralgia set in — partly from overstrain of work & financial straits etc. Still, all might have gone well, had not I gone one day (under great stress of agony) to a dentist to be sure there was nothing the matter with my teeth. He was a faddist, & incompetent — & having found all absolutely sound said he wd. take out 5 sound teeth then & there (& without gas!) as that would cure me! I was weak enough to be persuaded of urgency — but after the second sound tooth had been literally torn out (for my teeth are very sound & strong) I fainted & he could do no more. It now turns out he was wholly wrong as to this — & I have lost two sound molars & have my neuralgia still, only worse! The nervous shock proved so bad for me that my wife, & the doctor, became seriously perturbed. The upshot was that a few days ago I was ordered away for a month to recruit by the sea — & would have gone 2 days ago but for a sudden painful attack of lumbago.

One can only wonder how people endured such a litany of pain.

Watts-Dunton had asked Sharp to make some revisions to the sonnets he contributed to The Sonnets of the Nineteenth Century which Sharp edited for the Walter Scott publishing company in 1886. He began this letter by assuring Watts-Dunton he would ask someone at the firm to make the “rectifications” in the volume’s next edition. Worried as he was about money, he went on to say the book had been through several editions, sold nearly 100,000 copies, and was about to undergo another edition. Yet he had received only £10 for editing it and benefited not at all from the substantial royalties. He planned to go into London the next day and try to raise enough money to take Elizbeth, who was “down with bronchitis,” to “recruit by the sea.” His bank or other friends came through, and they managed to escape for a month to Broadstair on the southern coast.

Shortly after returning to Chorleywood in early March, Sharp went to Edinburgh to visit his mother and sister for two days on “family business.” On March 15, he wrote to William Blackwood proposing an article for Blackwood’s Magazine on “Recent French Art” — he planned to visit Paris for the Salon which would open on April 2 — or an article on Breton poets since he planned to go on to Brittany from Paris. He had called at Blackwood’s Edinburgh office, but he was not there, and he would not have the pleasure of meeting him since he planned to return to London the next morning.

As it turned out, Sharp fell ill and instead of returning as planned on March 16, he stayed until Monday the 26th when, back in Chorleywood, he wrote a note to his friend Stanley Little: “Just returned — but E. still very seedy and at her mother’s. I go there now but shall be back tomorrow and hope to write then or Wedny.” Two days later, he wrote again and began by saying he was months behind with urgent work due to illnesses, his and Elizabeth’s. After recounting the progress of their maladies, he turned to the work he had managed to do. Between January 1 and 21, he wrote 50,000 words for what would become The Progress of Art in the Nineteenth Century. Then he came down with the flu and was unable to continue. He still had 70,000 words to write, but he could not get to it until mid-April. Elizabeth agreed to write an additional 15,000 words about music, and they hoped to have it all done before the end of May. It was commissioned by The Linscott Publishing Company in Toronto and Philadelphia and became Volume Twenty-Two in their gigantic Nineteenth Century Series. It was also published separately in 1902 by W. and R. Chamber, Ltd., in London and Edinburgh.

Little asked Sharp about this work because he had agreed to write another volume for the Linscott series and wondered how much Sharp was being paid. Sharp said he “had special terms, without which it wd. have been wholly impossible to take up the book: and not only special terms, but special conditions of payment.” Unfortunately, he could not share those terms with Little because he was under a pledge of honor, a given promise, not to do so. He also asked Little not to mention his name or what he had told him when dealing with the Linscott firm. Unless specified in a contract, Little was unlikely to get an advance from Linscott so he should just send in his manuscript and hope for royalties. He told Little he was leaving in a few days to review the Salon in Paris and then to spend some time in Brittany. When he returned, he hoped he and Elizabeth could get together with Little and his wife. Meanwhile, “Iona,” the “highly autobiographical” Fiona Macleod essay Sharp wrote in the fall of 1899, appeared in the March and April issues of TheFortnightly Review.

When he returned from France in mid-April, Sharp began to make arrangements for a performance of a Fiona Macleod play, the only such performance during his lifetime. While visiting Grant Allen in 1897, he met Frederick Whelen, one of Allen’s nephews, who wanted to find a vehicle for producing contemporary art plays. Sharp expressed interest since he was writing a highly symbolic Fiona Macleod play destined, he thought, for the Celtic Theater W. B. Yeats was planning in Dublin. In July 1899, Whelen, encouraged by Sharp and several prominent actors and businessmen, invited several hundred people to attend an organizing meeting for what became the Stage Society. Seventy-five invitees showed up at his house in London’s Red Lion Square. Despite the crowd, Whelen managed to form a seven-member Managing Committee that included Sharp. It was agreed the Society would sponsor several performances of new plays every year. They would take place on Sunday evenings when theaters would otherwise be dark because of the prohibition of public performances on the Sabbath. To circumvent the law and avoid prosecution, the performances would be called meetings of the Society and only members of the society and invited guests would be able to attend.

The performances began in the fall of 1899, and Whelen, with Sharp’s encouragement, scheduled a production of Fiona Macleod’s “The House of Usna” for the fifth meeting of the Society in the Globe Theatre on April 29 1900. Sharp sent a Fiona letter to Whelen dated April 16 in which she gave her permission for the performance and delegated all final revisions and performance details to her “friend and relative Mr. William Sharp.” Her only request had to do with “reserved accommodations.” She asked for two contiguous boxes, one for her friends the Sharps and herself if she was able to “come from Scotland for the occasion.” She wanted to offer the second to George Meredith in case he was able to attend or, if not, to other friends. She requested eight reserved stall seats which she designated for W. L. Courtney, Editor of The Fortnightly; James Knowles Esq., Editor of The Nineteenth Century; W. B. Yeats. Esq.; Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Rhys; The Hon. Alfred & Mrs. A. Lyttelton; and Mr. Percy Bunting, Editor of TheContemporary Review. The tickets were to be given directly to Sharp who would either send them to Fiona or forward them as she directed. The absence of Edith and Frank Rinder from the list of people for whom tickets were to be reserved is curious. I expect it was due to the possibility that Meredith might attend. We recall Sharp had introduced Edith as Fiona Macleod to Meredith who described her as one of the most beautiful women he ever met. It would be more than embarrassing if he saw Edith at the performance and identified her as Fiona, the author of the play. Since Meredith, in the end, was unable to attend, the Rinders may have been among the friends who occupied the second reserved box.

“The House of Usna” was one of three Fiona plays Sharp had been writing with Yeats’ encouragement. On April 29, it shared the bill with two Maeterlinck plays: “The Interior” and “The Death of Tintagiles.” Y. M. Capel composed music for the Sharp play, and it was directed by Granville Barker. According to Elizabeth, one critic said the play had beauty and atmosphere, “two very rare things on the stage, but I did not feel that it quite made a drama, or convince, as a drama should, by the continuous action of inner or outer forces. It was, rather, passion turning upon itself, and with no language but a cry.” Other reviews were more positive. Elizabeth said Sharp “took the greatest interest in the rehearsals, and in the performance. He thoroughly enjoyed the double play as he chatted about Fiona during the intervals unconcerned about the risks of their detecting the real authorship.” The play was printed in The National Review in July 1900 and then in book form by Thomas Mosher in Maine in 1903 (Memoir, pp. 317–18).

By July 1900, the Stage Society was floundering for lack of resources. Sharp and Whelen developed a plan to rescue it which Sharp described in a letter to the actor/manager Frederick Charles Charrington, a fellow member of the Managing Committee. The plan prevailed, Sharp became the Society’s Chairman, and Whelen its Secretarial Manager. The Society went on for forty years and produced more than two hundred plays that would not have succeeded at first in the West End.

For some time, Sharp had used the London address of Lillian Rea rather than that of his sister in Edinburgh as the return address for the Fiona letters. Receiving the letters in London, where he spent most of his time while in Britain, enabled him to draft answers more quickly and send them to Edinburgh for Mary to copy and mail. In a June 1 letter to Grant Richards, Fiona identified Miss Rea as her lateagent and typist and said she was away recovering from illness. Fiona was having all her correspondence “sent through a literary friend, whose address heads this letter.” This address (11 Woronsow Road, London) was the home of Edith Rinder who was often conflated in Sharp’s mind with Fiona and who began to provide secretarial assistance for Sharp.

In June 1899, Grant Richards, at Sharp’s suggestion, asked Fiona to assemble and edit a poetry anthology which would be called “The Hour of Beauty.” A year later, a Fiona letter informed Richards she could not promise to have the book done before the New Year. She had been “much of an invalid” since the previous November and unable to do much work. On 20 October 1900, Fiona wrote again to Richards, ­with the Lillian Rea return address restored, to say she was resting in London for two days before leaving England for Tangiers. She had been seriously ill, and “a southern air” and “absolute rest are imperatively prescribed.” She had to “relinquish[…] all hopes” of finishing The Hour of Beauty before or by Christmas. She wanted to give Richards the option of withdrawing from their agreement or letting it stand indefinitely until her health recovered so she could “take up properly that which can be done only absolutely con amore, and with scrupulous judgment and care.” She wondered, instead, if Richards would like to publish a little volume of her poetry in the spring:

It would be called either

For a Little Clan

or else

The Immortal Hour 

— the latter being the title of the greater part of the little book, a poetic old world drama, perhaps to be defined as “a symbolist drama” (though I dislike such designations) which is to appear in

The Fortnightly Review

either in November or December (or in both). The remainder of the book would consist of the few selected poems (all I care to preserve) from a volume of verse published some four or five years ago,

From the Hills of Dream

, with some new and uncollected poems.

A Fiona letter to Richards dated October 31 indicates he decided to defer the anthology until she was able to finish it. He liked her suggestion of a small book of poems which would include “The Immortal Hour.” In her response, Fiona expressed her hope that she would be able to select the poems and send copy for the book “from Marseille or Malta or Algiers (I do not know where yet) by the end of November.” In order to avoid Richards asking to meet Fiona, her October 20 letter informed him she would be in London only two days on her way South. Her October 31 letter is postmarked from Paris on November 13 which means Sharp held it for three weeks to avoid a London postmark and mailed it from Paris on his way south.

In the summer and fall of 1899, Sharp implied to several friends he was experiencing a blurring or a reintegration of the two aspects of his personality and suggested his future writings would reflect a merger of the Fiona voice and the William Sharp voice with the former more prominent in his fiction and poetry and the latter more prominent in his nonfiction. In his 8 January 1900 letter to Edith Lyttelton, Sharp said Fiona Macleod’s The Divine Adventure would be “unlike anything she has done; it would be personal and autobiographical, especially in the essay called ‘Iona’”, parts of which would appear in February and March in The Fortnightly. The periodical’s publisher, Chapman & Hall, would also publish the book containing “Iona” and other essays. When it appeared in May 1900, it carried a longer title derived from its content, The Divine Adventure: Iona: By Sundown Shores: Studies in Spiritual History, and it went through several editions during the year. In a Fiona letter to John Macleay in early October 1899 (Volume 2), Sharp wrote:

There is a sudden departure from fiction ancient or modern in something of mine that is coming out in the November and December issues of “The Fortnightly Review.” [Volume 72, pp. 879–895 and 1058–1076] I hope you will read “The Divine Adventure,” as it is called — though this spiritual essay is more “remote” i.e. unconventional, and in a sense more “mystical,” than anything I have done. But it is out of my inward life. It is an essential part of a forthcoming book of spiritual and critical essays or studies in the spiritual history of the Gael, to be called “The Reddening of the West.”

The essay improbably personifies the Body, the Will and the Soul and sets them on a journey, “each independently, as three good friends,” to discover the meaning of life: “We had never been at one, though we had shared the same home, and had enjoyed so much in common; but to each, at the same time, had come the great desire of truth, than which there is none greater save that of beauty.” Confusion sets in from the start as the narrator of the journey sees his Body, his Soul, and his Will independently travelling through a Scottish landscape each talking with people they meet along the way. Just who, we wonder, is the observer-narrator? What part is left after the departure of Body, Soul and Will? Perhaps the intellect, but that piece of the puzzle seems to merge with the Will or the Mind as the journey proceeds. It is a decided relief at the end to find the narrator having learned:

there is no absolute Truth, no absolute Beauty, even for the Soul. It may be that in the Divine Forges we shall be so moulded as to have perfect vision. Meanwhile only that Truth is deepest, that beauty highest which is seen, not by the Soul only, or by the Mind, or by the Body, but all three as one. Let each be perfect in kind and perfect in unity. This is the signal meaning of the mystery.

If that is the conclusion, was the thirty-four-page journey worth the author’s effort and the reader’s patience? It must have been, since the book went through several editions. Its success shines a bright light on the efforts of many in 1900 to come to terms with the previous century’s scientific discoveries. With its masculine narrator and the masculine nature of his dissected parts, the essay comes out of the “inward life” of William Sharp, and Fiona Macleod, the nominal author, is nowhere to be heard.

The longest essay in the volume is “Iona” in which the narrative voice of Fiona alternates with that of Sharp in chronicling stories and legends associated with the island (pp. 91–252). In a letter to Frank Rinder the previous December (Chapter 19, Volume 2), Sharp said he would like him to read

the opening pages of “Iona,” for they contain a very deep and potent spiritual faith and hope, that has been with me ever since, as there told, as child of seven, old Seumas Macleod (who taught me so much — was indeed the

father

of Fiona) took me on his knees one sundown on the island of Eigg, and made me pray to “Her.” I have never written anything so spiritually autobiographical. Strange as it may seem it is almost all literal reproduction of actuality with only some dates and names altered.

In the opening pages of “Iona”, Sharp as Fiona said she will speak “as befalls her pen” of the multiple meanings of Iona, and she will recount legends and remembrances of her own and others. She will describe “hidden meanings and beauty and strangeness surviving in dreams and imaginations, rather than facts and figures that others could adduce more deftly and with more will.” After a hundred and sixty-one Iona pages in the first edition of The Divine Adventure, Sharp/Fiona summarized the history of the island:

To this small, black-brown tarn, pilgrims of every generation, for hundreds of years, have come. Solitary, these; not only because the pilgrim to the Fount of Eternal Youth must fare hither alone, and at dawn, so as to touch the healing water the moment the first sunray quickens it — but solitary, also, because those who go in quest of this Fountain of Youth are the dreamers and the Children of Dreams, and those are not many, and few come now to this lonely place. Yet, an Isle of Dreams Iona is, indeed. Here the last sun-worshippers bowed before the Rising of God; here Columba and his hymning priests labored and brooded; and here Oran or his kin dreamed beneath the monkish cowl that pagan dream of his. Here, too, the eyes of Fionn and Oisìn, and of many another of the heroic men and women of the Fiànna, may have lingered; here the Pict and the Celt bowed beneath the yoke of the Norse pirate, who, too, left his dreams, or rather his strangely beautiful soul-rainbows, as a heritage to the stricken; here for century after century, the Gael has lived, suffered, joyed, dreamed his impossible, beautiful dream; as here now, he still lives, still suffers patiently, still dreams, and through all and over all broods upon the incalculable mysteries.

The quotation illustrates the power of the essay which is the most lasting and influential piece of Sharp’s writings. Few may have come to Iona when it first appeared, but many, motivated by this essay, began to visit the island. Nowadays, hundreds visit this special place during the summer months, and many purchase booklets containing this essay in the island’s shops.

Fig. 1. Benedictine Abbey on Iona, Inner Hebrides, constructed in 1203 AD on the site of the Celtic Church which St. Columbo built after he settled on Iona in 563 AD and began to establish Christianity in Scotland. Photograph by PaulT (Gunther Tschuch) (2019), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iona_07.jpg

Fig. 2. Map of the Inner and Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Iona is located in the Inner Hebrides, just off the Isle of Mull. Map by Kelisi (2007), Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hebridesmap.png#/media/File:Hebridesmap.png

The section of The Divine Adventure called “By Sundown Shores” (pp. 255–308) contains five short essays and a longer piece entitled “Celtic” which also appeared in the May issue of The Contemporary Review. “Celtic” exemplifies what Sharp referred to as the merger of his masculine and feminine voices better than many of the volume’s essays. One hears in it the voice of Fiona Macleod, but that of the practical literary and cultural critic William Sharp predominates. It is as though two separate persons were speaking, both under the control of a single consciousness. Early on we hear Fiona saying the Celtic Movement was not “as so often confusedly stated an arbitrary effort to reconstruct the past,” but an “effort to discover the past.” As “one imputed to this movement,” she sought “in nature and in life, and in the swimming thought of timeless imagination, for the kind of beauty that the old Celtic poets discovered and uttered.” Those poets had no monopoly on artistic beauty. No beauty of art excels “that bequeathed to us by Greece,” but artists must seek and express their ideals through their own tradition. Fiona placed herself firmly in the Celtic camp, the camp of her heritage: “There is one beauty that has to me the light of home upon it; there is one beauty from which, above all others now, I hope for a new revelation; there is a love, there is a passion, there is a romance, which to me calls more suddenly and searchingly than any other ancient love or ancient passion or ancient romance.”

After placing Fiona with her heightened rhetoric firmly among the Celts, Sharp reverted to the plainer language of the literary critic. Still writing as Fiona, he began to sound like the critic William Sharp. Although not a great believer in “movements” or “renascences,” he understood the “Celtic Movement” as “the natural outcome, the natural expression of a freshly inspired spiritual and artistic energy.” Its source was “a mythology and a literature, and a vast and wonderful legendary folklore […] in great part hidden behind veils of an all but forgotten tongue and of a system of life and customs, ideals and thought that no longer obtains.” Then, veering toward dangerous territory, he said he was unable to see the Celtic movement as having “sustenance in elements of revolt.” If a movement is to have any force, “it will not destroy itself in forlorn hopes, but will fall into line, and so achieve where alone the desired success can be achieved.” He took his examples from the realm of art, but “revolt” and “falling into line” opened the door to politics.

Having placed Fiona, and by extension himself, in the “Celtic Movement,” he then placed both figures squarely in the tradition of English literature. The term Celtic writer “must denote an Irish or Scottish Gael, a Cymric or Breton Celt, who writes in the language of his race.” Those who write in English, however, are English writers “who in person happen to be an Irish Gael, or Highland, or Welsh.” He was willing to be designated

Celtic only if the word signifies an English writer who by birth, inheritance, and temperament has an outlook not distinctively English, with some memories and traditions and ideals not shared in by one’s countrymen of the South, with a racial instinct that informs what one writes, and, for the rest, a common heritage.

The paragraph that stands out among the others in the essay turns overtly from literature to the issue of national identity:

Above all else it is time that a prevalent pseudo-nationalism should be dissuaded. I am proud to be a Highlander, but I would not side with those who would “set the heather on fire.” If I were Irish, I would be proud, but I would not lower my pride by marrying it to a ceaseless ill-will, an irreconcilable hate, for there can be a nobler pride in unvanquished acquiescence than in revolt. I would be proud if I were Welsh, but I would not refuse to learn English, or to mix with English as equals. And proud as I might be to be Highland or Scottish or Irish or Welsh or English, I would be more proud to be British — for, there at last, we have a bond to unite us all, and to give us space for every ideal, whether communal or individual, whether national or spiritual.

Those carefully chosen words placed all Celtic people in the British Isles, including Ireland, under the British umbrella.

Sharp knew that AE (George William Russell) and Yeats were intent on establishing Ireland as an independent country free of the English yoke. His argument for unity was, therefore, a direct attempt to discourage them from advocating separation from the British Empire to which he remained loyal throughout his life. Though he knew his views would not sit well with them or with other Irish writers advocating independence, Sharp hoped to soften their attitudes, to dissuade them from overt revolutionary activities, and above all to maintain his own position in a Celtic Literary Movement that transcended nationalisms. He underestimated the depth of AE’s feelings, the fire underlying his rhetoric, and the strength of the Irish independence movement.

Such is the background of a June 15 Fiona Macleod letter to George Russell. He had written to put her on notice that he intended to write a review of The Divine Adventure that took issue with her “Celtic” essay. In response, Fiona expressed her regret that AE rejected her effort to “save our Gaelic remnant from extinction.” She hoped he would give up “the transitory while inevitable logic of human sorrow and revolt” and adopt “the immortal and inevitable logic of the Spirit.” That hope failed to dissuade AE.

His review appeared in the July 21 issue of Standish O’Grady’s All Ireland Review (volume 1, number 29). He began by saying there were many things in the book everyone could enjoy. In the title essay, “The Divine Adventure,” and in “Iona” there was “a graver and more retrained use of that rhetorical eloquence which Miss Macleod perhaps finds it too easy to employ.” If at times there was “only vagueness where a mystic meaning was intended,” there was also “genuine imagination and frequent beauty of thought and style.” That said, he turned to “Celtic” and its “anti-nationalistic” stance. Casting aside reasoned argument, he accused Fiona of “arrogance and shallowness of judgment” and remarked disparagingly, “it is perhaps like a woman to advise a cheap peace between race and race.” She was unable, he said, to distinguish “English emotion from Celtic emotion, or from Hindu emotion.” She was “devoid of the faculty of analysis or the power of seeing distinctions, not even subtle distinctions, but glaring ones.” He imagined a good Briton reading this essay and feeling quite satisfied that “there were to be no more wild Irish; that he was not to be troubled further with revolt or plain speaking; the truth would be modified to suit his capacity for receiving it.” He would beam in satisfaction as the Celtic “crown of strange jewels” is placed on his brow. AE concluded with some high-handed advice that drew a clear and foreboding line between the Irish and Scottish revivalists: “It is to be hoped in the future if Miss Macleod wishes to write semi-political essays she will speak only for the Scottish Celt. We are a strange people over here and we dislike being preached to by foreigners.” When we read this review with the knowledge that Sharp had told AE that he was Fiona Macleod, pledging him thus to secrecy, we recognize, as did Sharp, that “perhaps like a woman” was a double-barreled shot.

Standish O’Grady attempted to ameliorate the venom of AE’s review by following it in the same issue of the All Ireland Review with a different assessment of The Divine Adventure by someone who signed the review only J. S. (2–3): “From the beginning of her remarkable career till now Miss Fiona Macleod has done nothing so beautiful and lofty as this wonderful book.” The praise became increasingly elaborate. “Iona,” J. S. wrote, was “so full of spiritual light, not raying out aimlessly into the void but clothing reality and life with beauty, that it is no exaggeration to describe them [the rays] as adding a new sacredness to the Mecca [Iona] of the Gael.” Turning to “Celtic,” the reviewer met AE headlong:

Miss Macleod showed “that her keen insight does not fail her in a region of thought far removed from that into which she has hitherto taken her readers. A Celt of the Celt, and possessed as no other writer of our time is possessed with a sense of the faculty and mission of the Celt, she shows here not only deep intuition but the power [quoting Mathew Arnold] “to see life steadily and see it whole,” of which the Celt, in this country at least, must acquire some greater measure before his flame can burn with any but a destructive power.

The real argument, he concluded, was not between the Scots and the Irish, but among the Irish themselves.

In the next issue of the All Ireland Review (July 28) O’Grady printed in the letters section the following sentence: “We overhold an interesting communication from the celebrated Fiona Macleod in reference to strictures recently made in A. I. R. on her latest book ‘The Divine Adventure.’” In that communication — dated July 22 and printed in the next edition of the weekly (August 4) — Fiona thanked the unidentified J. S. for his praise and responded to AE’s charges. She denied her inability to see distinctions, stated she was not anti-nationalistic, and reaffirmed her belief that “Genius does not lie with any one race.” Rather it is “a calling of the Spirit to one soul here, another there; neither tribe nor clan has the divine mystery as its own.” Allowing that some of her fellow Gaels may be “in some things […] astray”, she insisted that “others, and the English in particular, are not invariably and inevitably in the wrong, and stupid and malevolent.” Justice and love, not hatred and resentment, must accompany nationalism. Taking up AE’s gender challenge, Fiona asserted that even a woman knows “there is a peace which is death.” She did not advocate “a cheap peace between race and race,” but an ideal for “our broken and scattered race that may not only uplift and ennoble but may bring about a great and wonderful regeneration.” Here Sharp referred obliquely to the regenerative goals of Yeats’ Celtic Mystical Order which he and AE shared. Fiona’s attempt to clarify her position only caused AE to harden his. In a letter O’Grady published which constituted the entire front page of the August 18 All Ireland Review, he accused Fiona of labeling nationalism as “race hatred,” reasserted his adherence to Irish nationalism, and confessed he had no love for England. Cuttingly, he called Fiona a Briton and an English writer who, unlike some other Scottish Celts, lacked the aspiration to nationality common among Irish Gaels.

The public exchange of correspondence concluded with a letter from T. W. Rolleston on the front page of the August 25 All Ireland Review. After noting that AE’s letters contained “so much that is good and true,” Rolleston addressed what he considered the major errors of his ideas about nationalism. Taking issue with AE’s emphasis on British oppression, he suggested the Irish had not been so much oppressed as indifferent to the claims of their heritage and that any changes in attitude must be enforced by the Irish people themselves. He also criticized AE for confusing the Celtic spiritual movement with the Irish political movement, adding that “Ireland might have her local legislature and yet be thoroughly denationalized and vulgarized or that she might attain nationalism in social life, literature, and art and yet “be content with her present voice in the Imperial Parliament.” After criticizing the bitterness and hatred underlying much of the political movement, he said AE and Fiona Macleod were pressing each other to extreme views; their positions were complementary, not contradictory. Finally, he commended Fiona’s Celticism, insisted she was a “helper not a hinderer,” and condemned AE’s bias against her as a Scottish Celt. Despite the efforts of O’Grady, J.S., and Rolleston to keep Fiona on board and maintain a unified movement, AE’s attack, fueled by the growing spirit of Irish nationalism, caused a rift between the Irish and the Scots that became increasingly difficult to bridge.

In late August Sharp wrote a letter to Yeats in which he expressed his feelings about AE’s attack: “As for AE, I think I had better not say what I think: but of one thing I am very sorry, his inevitable loss of prestige among those of his own circle who like myself have thought so highly of him and his work. None can now accept him as a thinker, or as a fair and loyal opponent, however else one may regard him.” The letter re-enforced what Sharp had told Yeats about Fiona — that she was an independent individual with a will of her own, mysteriously speaking through him, and that there was a flesh and blood woman whom Sharp loved and on whom he depended to evoke this persona. He wished Fiona would not take notice of critics. He wished he had seen her letter to the All Ireland Review before she sent it. And he wished AE would be “content to be the poet and seer, and not turn aside to these unworthinesses.”

Perhaps motivated by encouragement from Yeats and by Rolleston’s suggestion that they were pushing each other to extremes, Sharp drafted a Fiona letter to AE in mid-September saying she wanted to go with him on the “quest,” not apart from him. This letter evoked a conciliatory response from Russell in which he said he had no personal feelings against her: “You are to me so far only a beautiful myth.” He never fights, he said, “except when I feel the spiritual life of Ireland is threatened and when I fight why of course I do it with all the energy I can put into it.” He often fights with his friends, he said, and remains good friends with his opponents. He hoped to remain friends with Fiona because she belonged to “the clan,” the group of Irish or Scottish people “who’s ideal is mainly a spiritual one.” The clan included O’Grady, Yeats, Hyde, Lady Gregory, and others whom Fiona/Sharp did not know. Finally, he enclosed a spray of heather as a peace offering. The letter is written with the full awareness that its recipient would not be “a beautiful myth,” but William Sharp. Indeed, AE had written to Yeats on July 13, a week before his first review appeared in print, that he was “a little sorry” he had been “so savage,” but he hoped it would “do Fiona/Sharp some good.” We can only wonder if his review would have been so savage had he thought Fiona a real woman.

Sharp responded as Fiona on October 20. Briefly in London on her way to southern France, she accepted AE’s offer of continuing friendship: “Your spray from the sacred hill brought me not only a message from your inward self, but more than you could know perhaps. Some fallen link has been caught up through it — and, too, a truer understanding has come to me in one or two points where we have been at issue.” She hoped AE would read and like “The Immortal Hour” in a forthcoming Fortnightly Review and a forthcoming essay in The Nineteenth Century on “The Gael and his Heritage” which dealt with “the treasure-trove of the spiritual hymns and ancient lore in the Hebrides.” The breach with AE was thus papered over, but there followed a decided cooling of enthusiasm for the writings of Fiona Macleod among the independence-minded Irish.

In addition to managing this public controversy, Sharp continued his association with the evolving Stage Society during the summer and fall. Except for two brief trips to Scotland in late summer, he stayed in Chorleywood and London. He continued to work on the long William Sharp essay that was published in 1902 as Progress of Art in the XIX Century. An article titled “Some Dramas of Gabrielle d’Annunzio,” appeared in the September Fortnightly Review, and the October issue of the Art Journal carried his article about the work of Monro S. Orr, a well-known contemporary Scottish painter, etcher and illustrator. In November, Fiona Macleod’s “The Immortal Hour” appeared in TheFortnightly Review and her “The Gael and His Heritage” in TheNineteenth Century. The latter was a lengthy and adulatory tribute to Alexander Carmichael’s recently published Carmina Gadelica.

In early November, Sharp began a letter at his club (the Grosvenor) to Murray Gilchrist with the incident that occasioned the letter:

A little ago, on sitting down in my club to answer some urgent notes (and whence I now write) my heart leapt with pleasure, and an undeserving stranger received Part I of a beaming welcome — for the waiter announced that “Mr. Gilchrist would like to see you, Sir.” Alas, it was no dear Peaklander, but only a confounded interviewer about the Stage Society!

He went on to say he and Elizabeth planned to leave England on November 12 and go first to Provence, near Marseilles and then, after Christmas, go on to Italy, “perhaps first to Shelley’s Spezzia or to Pegli of the Orange Groves near Genoa: and there we await you, or at furthest a little later, say in Florence. We shall be away till the end of March.” He had just returned from Dorset where he saw Thomas Hardy who was well and at work, “the two happiest boons of fortune for all our kinship.” He wished Gilchrist would come to London for the Stage Society production that weekend, Sunday November 11, of a play by Hardy, another by Robert Lewis Stevenson, and William ErnestHenley’s “Macaire.” Sharp said he had resigned as Chairman of the Stage Society but was re-elected, so he is extra busy before leaving for France. As usual in his letters to Gilchrist, Sharp told him how he was feeling; “all unpleasantness and incertitude: much to do and little pleasure in the doing: a restlessness too great to be salved short of departure, and the longed for mental and nervous rest far away.”

Ill-health continued to plague both Sharps in the late summer and early fall. Mrs. Sharp described their condition movingly: