Foam of the past

Fiona Macleod was clearly a gentlelady of breeding and intellect. She was almost 'one of us' - but not quite. It was this slight difference that allowed her to deal with dark and frightening characters and subjects in a way that gave them the glamour of the Celtic Otherworld in an intriguing and believable manner. She opened up a whole new world of language, ancient songs, poems and proverbs that had never before been presented to the English-speaking peoples south of the Scottish Highlands. She was a darling of late Victorian literature and earnestly courted by the fin-de-siècle 'Celtic Twilight' movement. Only after her 'death' in 1905 was it revealed that all the works attributed to her were penned by the art and literary critic William Sharp. This collection, edited and selected by Sharp's biographer Steve Blamires, contains some of her more important, curious and obscure pieces, annotated and explained where necessary, including provocative dark tales, mystical parables, reveries of nature, political polemics, delightful vignettes and some previously unpublished fragments from William Sharp's notebooks.