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William Sharp (writer)William Sharp (12 September 1855 – 12 December 1905) was a Scottish writer, of poetry, fiction, and literary biography, who from 1893 wrote also as Fiona Macleod, a pseudonym kept virtually secret during his lifetime, with Fiona Macleod becoming much more famous and popular, and biographed independently in contemporary sources. He was also an editor of the poetry of Ossian, Walter Scott, Matthew Arnold. Algernon Swinburne and Eugene Lee-Hamilton. He was born in Paisley and educated at Glasgow Academy and Glasgow University, which he attended 1871-1872 without completing a degree. In 1872 he contracted typhoid. During 1874-5 he worked in a Glasgow law office. His health broke down in 1876 and he was sent on a voyage to Australia. In 1878 he took a position in a bank in London. He was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti by Sir Noel Paton , and joined the Rossetti literary group; which included Hall Caine, Philip Bourke Marston and Swinburne. He married his cousin Elizabeth in 1884, and devoted himself to writing full time from 1891, travelling widely. Also about this time, he developed an intensely romantic but perhaps asexual attachment to Edith Wingate Rinder, another writer of the consciously Celtic Edinburgh circle surrounding Patrick Geddes and "The Evergreen." It was to Rinder ("EWR") he attributed the inspiration for his writings as Fiona Macleod thereafter, and to whom he dedicated his first Macleod novel ("Pharais") in 1894. Sharp had a complex and ambivalent relationship with W. B. Yeats during the 1890s, as a central tension in the Celtic Revival. Yeats initially found Macleod acceptable and Sharp not, and later fathomed their identity. Sharp found the dual personality an increasing strain. He died (and is buried) at Castello di Maniace , Sicily. In 1910, Elizabeth Sharp published a biographical memoir attempting to explain the creative necessity behind the deception, and edited a complete edition of his works. Works
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