cation of himself with
woman such as is George Meredith's. Sharp had already been experimenting
with pseudonyms, that of "H.P. Siwaarmill," an anagram on his own name,
being that he recurred to most often. He had written the whole of "The
Pagan Review" in 1892 under eight different pseudonyms, and though, in
the estimation of those to whom "Fiona Macleod" is all but a sacred
name, it be sacrilegious to say it, William Sharp loved all sorts of
fantastic tricks, hoaxes, mystifications, though in almost all his
writing save in "Wives in Exile" he was seriousness itself. But the
chiefest reason of all, in my estimation, for his assumption of a
woman's name as his pseudonym was that it afforded greater protection
against discovery. There are those who believe that he chose it because
he wanted a chance to express that womanly element of human nature there
is in all men, and there are others who believe that he was the
possessor of a real dual personality in which the "Fiona Macleod's self"
was a woman's consciousness; but he very infrequently, after "The
Mountain Lovers" (1895), kept in mind in the writings he published as
"Fiona Macleod's" that their author was supposed to be a woman, and it
is wonderful, indeed, that he was able to preserve the secret until the
end. In the earlier "Fiona Macleod" writing there is no revelation of
the wide acquaintance with literature that was Sharp's, but despite his
harassment by the constant identification of himself with "Fiona
Macleod," he gradually allowed to creep into that writing more and more
of what was known to be the knowledge of William Sharp, a knowledge
unlikely to be also that of a Highland lady who lived apart from the
world. His friends pointed out to him the danger he was running in
writing from what was obviously a man's standpoint, as in his tales of
the wars of Gael and Gall, and of revealing several sorts of interest
that were known to be his, but their warnings were in vain. He was
apparently unable to limit himself to the restrictions of the part of
himself he had essayed to restrict himself to.

For my own part I was now sure the writing must be Sharp's and now sure
it could not be his. I did not know of his intimate concern with
questions of feminism until I read Mrs. Sharp's "Memoir," so that
outspoken chant, the "Prayer of Women" in "Pharais," "Fiona Macleod's"
first book, colored my outlook on all the writing that followed. I had
no doubt at all but that "Phar