ARTICLE

A PSYCHIC TRANSVESTITE?

Vern L. Bullough

Editor's Note: Dr. Bullough is a professor of history. From time to time he runs across something related to FPia in his historical researches and contributes it to TVia.

A possibly interesting case of transvestism, or at least of psychic transvestism, is that of William Sharp (1855-1905), a prominent English writer. During the last decade of his life Sharp assumed the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" in order to better express what he felt was his feminine soul. He went to great pains to create a personality for Fiona and regarded her work as totally different from his own. In- creasingly he wrote only as Fiona Macleod while William Sharp himself went into eclipse as a writer. The secret of the dual identity of Sharp and Macleod was known only to a few intimate friends who did not reveal the deception until after the death of Sharp.

The purpose of this brief paper is not to compare the writings of Sharp as Sharp with those of Sharp as Macleod, but to give a brief sketch of the man and portray some of his feelings Today Sharp, when he is remembered at all, is regarded as a rather minor writer, half mis- sionary half charlatan, suspect as a transvestite who used his un- usual sympathy with women to perpetrate a literary hoax upon his con- temporaries. His most recent biographer, Flavia Alaya, argues that if the identity of Sharp as Macleod had been kept a secret after his death, both his and Macleod's work would have been more highly regarded. Whether this is true or not, what Sharp did was to carry to its logical ex- treme the inherent transvestism of some of the romanticism inherent in his own day in the popular fiction and in the sex writings of such people as Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis.

Some of the information we have about him would fit in with many of the facts put forth in the autobiographies which appear in Transvestia. As a child he reportedly felt different from other children, so different that he came to believe that he had a previous existence