The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study or the Birth of Fiona Macleod, Incorporating Two Lost Works, Ariadne in Naxos and Beatrice(2 Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature)

By the time he died in 1905, the Scottish writer William Sharp had succeeded as critic, biographer, poet, and novelist. Writing secretly, he also achieved fame as Fiona Macleod, a poet singled out by Yeats for her role in the Celtic revival. Two important lost works bearing on Sharp's creation of Fiona Macleod are printed here for the first time - Ariadne in Naxos, a tragedy inspired in part by Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Beatrice, an idyllic poem. The author introduces both works in the context of Sharp's life, showing how they highlight the sexual uncertainties Sharp felt as he contemplated marriage and how they foreshadow the birth of Fiona Macleod during the 1890's, the period when Sharp himself suffers a sexual identity crisis. Meyers uses gay and gender studies to examine Sharp's place in the late Victorian crucible for modern constructions of sexual roles.

About the Author :
The Author: Terry L. Meyers received his B.A. from Lawrence University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. A specialist in Victorian poetry, he is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

Review :
This edition of two recently discovered works by William Sharp (a.k.a. Fiona Macleod) not only adds to the canon of a fascinating figure in literary Pre-Raphaelitism, but also helps flesh out sexual identity in the Victorian Age. Meyers' edition is an important one for all students of Victorian poetry and culture, especially those interested in gay and gender studies. (Jerome J. McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English, University of Virginia) One of the most fascinating of all late Victorian figures, William Sharp, writing in an ambi-sexual mode both as himself and as the female Fiona Macleod, has not until now been sufficiently acknowledged. Terry Meyers' retrieval of two hitherto lost works and his appraisal of Sharp/Macleod, from fresh angles, stress the jumbled nature of sexual boundaries among the Victorians from the Pre-Raphaelites to Yeats. (Robert L. Peters, Professor Emeritus of English, University of California, Irvine)