to America in 1896, concerning his wishes in the event of his death—­he realized that it was “to her I owe my development as ’Fiona Macleod,’ though in a sense of course that began long before I knew her, and indeed while I was still a child,” and that, as he believed, “without her there would have been no ‘Fiona Macleod.’” Because of her beauty, her strong sense of life and of the joy of life; because of her keen intuitions and mental alertness, her personality stood for him as a symbol of the heroic women of Greek and Celtic days, a symbol that, as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him “in touch with ancestral memories” of his race.  So, for a time, he stilled the critical, intellectual mood of William Sharp, to give play to the development of this new-found expression of subtle emotions, towards which he had been moving with all the ardour of his nature.

From this statement of Mrs. Sharp one naturally turns to the dedication of Pharais to which she refers, finding a dedicatory letter to “E.W.R.” dealing for the most part with “Celtic” matters, but containing these more personal passages: 

Dear friend [the letter begins], while you gratify me by your pleasure in this inscription, you modestly deprecate the dedication to you of this study of alien life—­of that unfamiliar island-life so alien in all ways from the life of cities, and, let me add, from that of the great mass of the nation to which, in the communal sense, we both belong.  But in the Domhan-Toir of friendship there are resting-places where all barriers of race, training, and circumstances fall away in dust.  At one of these places we met, a long while ago, and found that we loved the same things, and in the same way.

The letter ends with this:  “There is another Paras (Paradise) than that seen of Alastair of Innisron—­the Tir-Nan-Oigh of friendship.  Therein we both have seen beautiful visions and dreamed dreams.  Take, then, out of my heart, this book of vision and dream.”

“Fiona Macleod,” then, would appear to be the collective name given to a sort of collaborative Three-in-One mysteriously working together:  an inspiring Muse with the initials E.W.R.; that psychical “other self” of whose existence and struggle for expression William Sharp had been conscious all his life; and William Sharp, general litterateur, as known to his friends and reading public.  “Fiona Macleod” would seem to have always existed as a sort of spiritual prisoner within that comely and magnetic earthly tenement of clay known as William Sharp, but whom William Sharp had been powerless to free in words, till, at the wand-like touch of E.W.R.—­the creative stimulus of a profound imaginative friendship—­a new power of expression had been given to him—­a power of expression strangely missing from William Sharp’s previous acknowledged writings.