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Updated: May 7, 2025
We were both intimate friends of William Sharp, but I was better acquainted with Sharp's earlier poetry than Grant Allen, and it was my detection in Pharais of one or two subtly observed natural images, the use of which had previously struck me in one of his Romantic Ballads and Poems of Phantasy, that brought to my mind in a flash of understanding that Rudgwick conversation with Mrs.
In the "Memoirs" compiled by Elizabeth Sharp, wife of the writer, we find the following: "The life of William Sharp divides itself naturally into two halves: the first ends with the publication by William Sharp of 'Vistas, and the second begins with 'Pharais, the first book signed Fiona Macleod."
Sharp was thus vaguely hinting at the future "Fiona Macleod," for it was at Rudgwick, we learn, that that so long mysterious literary entity sprang into imaginative being with Pharais.
In explanation of why he chose to put out so much of the creative work of his brain under the signature of a woman, and how he happened to use the name Fiona Macleod, Sharp explained that when he began to realize how strong was the feminine element in the book Pharais, he decided to issue the book under a woman's name and Fiona Macleod "flashed ready-made" into his mind.
In the later years of his activity he fell captive to the new and unaccustomed music of Fiona Macleod's exquisite prose and verse; he wanted to dedicate his "New England Idyls" to the author of "Pharais" and "From the Hills of Dream," and wrote for her permission; but the identity of the mysterious author was then jealously guarded, and his letter must have gone astray; for it was never answered.
Wrote under this pseudonym a remarkable series of Celtic tales, novels, and poems, including Pharais, a Romance of the Isles, The Mountain Lovers, The Sin-Eater , The Washer of the Ford, and Green Fire , The Laughter of Peterkin , The Dominion of Dreams , The Divine Adventure , Drostan and Iseult . He was one of the earliest and most gifted promoters of the Celtic revival.
Pharais was published in 1894, and I remember that early copies of it came simultaneously to myself and Grant Allen, with whom I was then staying, and how we were both somewhat intrigué by a certain air of mystery which seemed to attach to the little volume.
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