Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/298

 262 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