I
n a small cypress-darkened Sicilian graveyard is a strange
tomb. On its face are two names - one male, the otherfemale. ey share a date of birth -12 September 1855 - as
though they were twins. But they also share a very much later
date of death - 12 December 1905 -by all appearances more
then a remarkable coincidence.
e two names are ‘William Sharp’ and ‘Fiona Macleod’
and below them are inscribed, respectively, fitting lines of
verse they each wrote:
Farewell then to the known and exhausted
Welcome to the unknown and unfathomed
Love is more great than we conceive
And death is the keeper of unknown redemptions
William and Fiona were in fact one and the same, but notfrom the very beginning. Born in Paisley, and educated briefly
at Glasgow University, William settled in London where he
associated with many of the leading artists and literati of the
time. He published volumes of poetry, wrote biographies of
Shelley, Heine and Browning, and was commissioned for
articles and essays for periodicals. He was also a keen traveller.
The Key to Everything
For anyone of sensibility from Europe’s north, a journey to
Italy could have an enormous impact. Perhaps the most
famously recorded of all was the Italienische Reise of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe. For six weeks in 1787 he visited
Sicily. ‘Without Sicily,’ he wrote, ‘Italy creates no image in
the soul: here is the key to everything.’
Just over a century later, in 1893, came William Sharp’s own
first visit to the island and it was later that year that (coinci-
dentally?) he first mentioned to his publisher that ‘I wish to
adhere rigidly to the Fiona Macleodauthorship.’ What
spurred him to adopt such a nom de plume must have been
psychologically complicated, but this did appear to allow the
expression of a feminine side to his character. Indeed he was
supposed to have written to a friend that ‘in some things I am
more a woman than a man.’
e poetry ‘she’ wrote conferred on him a degree of
anonymity and eventually attracted greater praise than ‘his’.
A life of two halves and identities took hold. How did Sharp
(and Macleod) end up 25 miles inland from Sicily’s east
coast? A clue lies on a sign for the graveyard, the Cimitiro
Inglese dei Nelson, although this in turn begs other questions. Never Visited
In 1799, Horatio Nelson assisted the King of Naples in his
resistance to the French and, in gratitude, was conferred a
title and a fine Sicilian mansion opposite the graveyard. He
never visited it, but his descendants retained possession of
the Castello Nelson until the 1970s and they still,
apparently, own the graveyard where Sharp/Macleod is its
most famous internee.
Whatever literary heights he/she managed to achieve, they
are far outshone by the daughters of a Yorkshire vicar who,
in awe and honour of Nelson, changed his surname, and
theirs, to that of the town where the graveyard in Sicily is
located - Brontë. Perhaps Sharp too had gone there to pay
his respects?NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2016 SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER 15
ISLANDS BEYOND
Sicily by Hew Prendergast. Pastel drawing by Charles Ross 1891.Hew Prendergastfinds coincidences in Bronte, Sicily