William Sharp was the eldest child of David Galbraith Sharp (d.1876), textile manufacturer, and his wife, Katherine, daughter of William Brooks, Swedish vice-consul at Glasgow (her family was of Swedish descent). He was educated at Blair Lodge Academy, Polmont, and from 1867 at Glasgow Academy. Gifted at languages, he entered Glasgow University in 1871, where he was influenced by the charismatic professor of English, John Nichol. Sharp stayed at Glasgow for only two years and in 1874 was apprenticed to a lawyer's office in the city, shortly after an interlude of three months' travelling with a troupe of gypsies.
The death of his father in August 1876 precipitated a breakdown in Sharp's health, and he was sent to Australia to recuperate. This was to prove an imaginatively fruitful period. Sharpe returned to London in 1878. He wrote a travel essay on Australia, 'Through the Fern' in Chambers' Journal (1879). After a nine-year relationship Sharp married his first cousin, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp (1856-1932), a writer, in 1884. They had no children. In 1890 Sharp took a trip through Europe when he met Mrs Edith Wingate Rinder, a Celticist and translator of Breton folk tales, who spent three weeks with the Sharps at Rome. Sharp seems to have become at least emotionally involved with her, and she appears to have been the wellspring for the emergence of 'Fiona MacLeod', who began to take form in his mind in 1891.
The free verse and free themes in Sospiri di Roma (1891) marked a new departure for Sharp in his poetry: in point of verse form, it was pioneering work, cited alongside Walt Whitman and W. E. Henley by Richard Burton in 1894. One of its most frequently anthologized pieces, 'The White Peacock', probably gave D. H. Lawrence the title for his first novel, and it is possible that Sharp's free verse was also an influence on Lawrence. In The Pagan Review (1892) Sharp argued against discriminating between men and women, in language suggestive of the fraying of the boundaries of sex themselves. Sharp was to attempt to prove the presence of a woman within by developing the persona of Fiona MacLeod, who in large part took over his imaginative life from 1893 on. Her surname may derive from Seamus Macleod, an old fisherman Sharp had known as a boy, while her first name was the feminized form of Fionn/Fingal/Finn, the ancient Gaelic 'sleeping hero' of whom it was reputed in some traditions that he would, like Arthur, wake again to save his people.
R.D. Fitzgerald has suggested that C.J. Brennan's 'The Wanderer' was influenced by Fiona Macleod's The Immortal Hour ('Communication and the Exhaustion of a Style', Southerly 16.1, 1955, p 23). Sharp wrote or edited almost forty books in his own name, as well as about ten as Fiona MacLeod.
(Source: Adapted from Thomas Cooksey
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 156: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition.Ed. by William F. Naufftus (1996): 312-320; Murray G. H. Pittock, 'Sharp, William [Fiona MacLeod] (1855-1905)',
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004)
