William Sharp (1855-1905) was a journalist, poet, novelist, and editor largely remembered as a literary enigma because, halfway through his career, he began to write under the name Fiona Macleod. Macleod achieved the critical and artistic success Sharp had longed for, and Sharp’s own cousin suggested that the pseudonym was an attempt to get around the critical bias against him. Scholarly attention has focused primarily on the identity shift between Sharp and Macleod, with little writing devoted to the other aspects of Sharp’s life and career.
This thesis aims to write into that gap by focusing on the social connectivity that shaped Sharp’s career. It builds on others in contextualizing Sharp in relation to his contemporaries, but also illustrates in greater detail the interactive, connective pressures that were present in his life and career. The thesis focuses primarily on mapping and navigating Sharp’s interpersonal universe: his friends, acquaintances, and other connections across the literary world, especially those in positions of influence. The map of these acquaintances placed alongside shifts and developments in Sharp’s career demonstrates the influence of the professional and social network on Sharp. His work also shows conscious awareness of connectivity; from his biographies, in which he situates others through reference to their own sociability, to his anthology Sonnets of this Century, in which he deliberately places people within his network in a more prominent position than other writers he did not know or writers who were no longer living, to his work in The Pagan Review, which camps the little magazine so beloved of his contemporaries.
Beginning with his hastily written but first commercially successful work, Dante Gabriel Rosetti: A Record and a Study, Sharp used his connections directly in many ways that were often received as gauche by his contemporaries. I use this work to also demonstrate that economic survival was an incredibly forceful pressure. The economic pressures that Sharp faced are directly at odds with the upper-class homosocial network he relied on to survive, making navigating the two a delicate task. Through exploring the way connectivity and survival were connected for Sharp, I present a new, recuperative narrative surrounding ‘hack’ writers.
The internal and external pressures Sharp faced also show the dark side of the network. His later, more artistic works were tainted in critical reception by his previous reputation as a hack writer. To cope, he first struck out for a new audience in America; and then retreated into Fiona Macleod. Fiona Macleod gave him a textual space in which to explore not only his artistic desires, but also a feminine identity he had been confessing to envisioning in letters since the age of twenty-five. The network kept him alive, but the social structures he relied on to survive in some ways limited his exploration of his identity. The dissertation analyses Macleod as a textual body that provided Sharp a new identity as an escape from literary and social dysphoria, and uses her as a case study to examine narratives around feminine pseudonyms and transmisogyny.
In using Sharp as a case study, the dissertation explores and interrogates the concepts of literary networks, literary sociability, and literary connectivity as a whole. Sharp’s gender, class, and nationality make him an unusually vivid demonstration of how the network functioned within Victorian literary society. In examining Sharp’s life, we can understand more about the invisible structures that kept late-Victorian writers afloat – or sunk them.