Listen to this episode and get more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/fiona
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, rehydrate powdered language.
Thanks to all of you who’ve been sending me your thoughts about your names, next episode will be about those and it’s not too late for you to chip in if you’d like to: you can contact me in writing or voice form via theallusionist.org/contact. You can remain anonymous if you want, even in a show about names.
This month in the Allusioverse, which you can join via theallusionist.org/donate, we have a watchalong of one of the best Agatha Christie adaptations, Billy Wilder’s 1957 fim of Witness for the Prosecution; we’re also watching the current seasons of Great British Bake Off and the Canadian version, and every week paying members of the Allusioverse are receiving my drawings of Paul Hollywood in the style of medieval marginalia. Few things are more fun to draw than this! If you’re an Allusioverse member you can also get the ad free version of the show, regular livestreams with relaxing readings from my many retro reference books, bonus written content about the making of this show, and you get the company of your lovely fellow Allusionauts in the Allusioverse Discord. All that is at theallusionist.org/donate. And your funds help keep this independent podcast afloat too, so, nice work, you.
While we’re in this stretch of name episodes, I have brought up a couple of favourites from the Allusiovaults, and today is a story that first came out four years ago, about the name Fiona. I just thought it was so unexpected and tender and it had so many different angles to it. Also originally I released it in two parts, with a fortnight between them, and in between the episodes, my father died. He had had Parkinson’s Disease for at least two decades, with dementia in his final few years, and after dying slowlyslowlyslowly by tiny degrees, in November 2022 suddenly it was end times. My mother, brothers and I rushed to his bedside. He lay down for the last time, spoke for the last time, ate his last food (a sip of melted ice cream), closed his eyelids for the last time, and then… he DID NOT DIE! For ten days, he just snoozed his final snooze, and I sat at the foot of his final bed in the dimmed light, editing Harry Josie Giles’s gorgeous, soothing voice so beautifully telling this story. I hope you like it.
On with the show.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Fiona is a name I think now that still has a slightly romantic, slightly historical Scottish feel. I think everyone thinks it's an old Scottish name, but it's not an old Scottish name!
I'm Harry Josephine Giles, or Josie for short. I am a writer and performer from Orkney in Scotland, from the Northern Isles. My most recent book is a verse novel in Orkney Scots called Deep Wheel Orcadia. It's a science fiction verse novel, and it's just won the Arthur C Clark Award.
HZ: Welcome back to the show. Why did you want to return?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Well, I want to talk to you about the origins, the very surprising origins of the first name Fiona, which, when I started coming across this story, I couldn't quite believe it, but I've dug and dug and done more and more research and I'm pretty sure it's quite true. And I think a lot of people assume that it's a really old Gaelic name from the Highlands of Scotland. And it kind of is – but it also really isn't.
HZ: “Kind of is, but isn't”? Intriguing! How does that work?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Well, the first public figure – I'm confident saying this – the first public figure who had the name Fiona is the Scottish writer Fiona Macleod. So Fiona Macleod was writing at the very end of the 19th century/beginning of the 20th century, writing for about 12 years.
Now the caveat here is if you go into Scottish Census records, you will find a dozen Fionas who appear before Fiona Macleod. And that's in the Digital Census records, but I've gone to the original handwritten version of that dozen Fionas, and what you find is that certainly in most of the cases, if not all the cases, something that is not Fiona has been mistranscribed as Fiona. In a couple of them, there's just a sort of ink blot and you can't really tell what the name is.
HZ: Sorry, your middle name's Blot now.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Right? And a couple of them, it's definitely Flora, which is an old Scottish name, that is a very common old Scottish name. In a couple of them, it might be Iona, or it might be Laura, or Lorna….
HZ: And there's one Aarghh and a Licken, I think? None of these handwritten name look like Fiona to me.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But if it is Fiona, there's no record of that Fiona in the birth records. So it's all a bit of a mystery. But I think what's happening is that because people now think that Fiona is a very old Scottish name, when they come across an ambiguous entry in the census, when they're digitizing that, whether it's a computer trying to work out the name, or a human trying to work out the name, they superimpose the word 'Fiona', which they assume is old, onto the older record.
HZ: How far back do the Scottish census or birth records go?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: We are only going back into the 19th century, so into the early or mid 19th century. I'm trying to be as circumspect as I can be about this – I could be wrong about any of this. And if you go to ancestry.com, you will certainly find loads of Fionas from around the world, whether it's a name of a different derivation – but I've been to a few of them (I haven't systematically gone through them) and often you find exactly the same mistranslation thing happening.
HZ: Please inform us if you do have any slamdunk evidence of Fionas from before the late 19th century.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is also one boat called Fiona, which, if you're into historical racing boats, was actually quite a famous boat, which was made in the mid 19th century before Fiona Macleod was writing. And that was a sort of made up sequence of sounds, and in this case it was a derivation of the original boat's builder, the first person who was having the boat built had a name that then got slightly changed to be Fiona. Its original builder was H. Lafone of Liverpool, l-a-f-o-n-e, who, had a trading ship called Lafonia, and then had a boat built called Fiona. I don't know why he switched the vowels, but apparently the vowels got switched.
HZ: Just innovating.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Then the boat was taken over by a Mr. Emmanuel Boucher and this is the kicker: the boat was so successful that Boucher had several other Fionas built after it, and also gave the name to his daughter as a middle name, as a middle name. So, before Fiona Macleod, there is an Emily Honora Fiona Boucher. I might be wrong that he named the daughter after the boat, but the boat did come before the daughter. So it does seem like he really liked the name.
HZ: Certainly seems like he really liked that boat. Emily Honora Fiona Boucher's baptism was registered in 1868, nearly three decades before the first person to have the first name Fiona – definitely Fiona and not a mistranscription – Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I'm Moll Heaton-Callaway and I'm a scholar of book history and gender identity, queer book history, essentially. So I work in the ways that queer people have made books, made texts.
HZ: Moll's studies have concentrated on the writers Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. When Fiona Macleod's novels became popular in the 1890s, so did the name Fiona.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Given how common the name Fiona is now, you wouldn't have thought it just suddenly appeared in like 1893 or whatever. And it's this massive boom of this name, it starts from nothing and through the 1890s and the 1900s, you can count in a census how many people have this name.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: According to Scotland's People, which gathers the birth records and makes them available, there are no registered Fionas born before Fiona Macleod. In total, there are four Fionas born after Fiona Macleod and before 1900. Then in the next decade, the first decade of the 20th century, there are 19 Fionas in Scotland. And then in the second decade there are 24, and then in the third decade there are 115. And then in the fourth decade there are 643. And after that I stopped counting. So that name just starts exploding in popularity.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Which might be one reason why it seems so old, is because it became so ubiquitous so quickly that it doesn't seem even likely that it just started in the middle of nowhere in 1890.
HZ: But it did.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And I think it was because Fiona Macleod was so popular.
HZ: Naming trends often reflect the popularity of artists or their fictional characters – like how there were no baby Meridas registered in Britain until after Disney’s 2012 film Brave starring Princess Merida, or the name Wendy becoming popular after JM Barrie invented the name for the character in Peter Pan. But who was Fiona Macleod, the author that launched a thousand Fionas, and then more Fionas?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: She was hugely popular in her own time. She published multiple novels, books of poetry, a couple of plays; a huge amount of work in about 12 years. The Aberdeen Free Press at the time, in a review said of Fiona Macleod that "We know of no other author since Sir Walter Scott that has been so eminently successful as Miss Fiona Macleod."
HZ: Wow.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Her first novel was called Pharais, which is a form of the Gaelic word for paradise. It was published in 1894 and was subtitled 'A Romance of the Isles', which gives you a kind of impression of it. She was writing into what's called the Celtic Revival, which was this period across the Celtic countries of trying to revive a language that many people saw was fading, and to revive a culture that many people thought was fading. The Celtic revival in Ireland is probably the best known, and it was a bit less developed in Scotland. But Fiona Macleod from this first novel was talked about as this prophetess of the Celtic revival.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Macleod produces all of these books about Scottish life and Scottish heritage in a sort of Thomas Hardy is quite a close analog. So it's that kind of quite miserable tales of Scottish peasantry.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: She was a huge popular and critical success. She was also criticized for people who thought that this kind of Celtic romanticism was backward-looking or overly emotional. But for people who were kind of interested in the Celtic revival, she was a beacon of hope, really, for a Scottish Celtic revival. And she herself was a Gaelic speaker. She was from the island of Iona, which is a small island in the west of Scotland. And she came, so she said, from an old Gaelic tradition and a tradition of Gaelic storytelling and myth making. And a lot of her work was a way of kind of retelling a bunch of ideas about Gaelic life. So she kept writing for about 12 years and there was a lot of speculation about who exactly she was and what, what the details of her life were because she never appeared in public.
HZ: Sort of like an Elena Ferrante type.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Very much like that, very much like Ferrante; and people were, like Ferrante, constantly speculating about who she might have been. So there was a lot of speculation, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of rumours in the press. Her intermediary often was her cousin, who was a writer called William Sharp, a Scottish writer who was also publishing at the time, and was well known as an editor and reviewer and a minor novelist in his own right.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: William Sharp was a late Victorian writer who was not really the most popular writer in the world, was what you might call a hack writer, so wrote a lot of potboilers, a lot of quite cheap novels – and by cheap, I mean kind of sensationalist, inexpensive stories, like were published in boys magazines, that kind of story. But also published quite cheap biographies, and anthologies of poetry, and just sort of eked out a career in London that was not particularly fantastic career economically speaking.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And William Sharp was often involved in getting book deals for Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: And Fiona got a lot more popular than Sharp had ever been, had a lot more weight as an artist than Sharp ever did. And then suddenly Macleod stops publishing in 1905.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And then at the end of 1905, a bunch of friends of Fiona Macleod get this letter from Elizabeth Sharp, who was William Sharp's wife. And William Sharp had just died at the end of 1905, quite young, he was only 50 when he died, but he'd been quite ill for a lot of his life. And their mutual friends received this letter, posted by Elizabeth Sharp. And it reads: "This will reach you after my death. You will think I've wholly deceived you about Fiona Macleod, but in an intimate sense, this is not so, though, and inevitably in certain details, I have misled you. Only it is a mystery I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. The rest is silence. Farewell, William Sharp." And then as a post script – because this letter is so typical of William Sharp, he often wrote in this very flowery, very elusive way, and I think he wrote this letter and then realized he hadn't been entirely clear.
HZ: Clear as an egg.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So clear! And he adds this post script, which, "It is only right, however, to add that I, and only I was the author in the literal and literary sense of all written under the name of Fiona Macleod."
HZ: Ah!!!
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Gasp! Shock Reveal!
HZ: Big third act twist.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It is a huge twist.
This news, it really took the literary world by storm. It was republished across the literary press. There were defenses of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod; there were more defenses than criticism. There was a little bit of criticism and a little bit of a certain kind of prudish wondering about what William Sharp was up to taking on this Gaelic Catholic female persona. And William Sharp was was a Lowlander and a Protestant and ostensibly a man, and people didn't really understand what was going on with that. And that kind of debate raged for years after the death of William Sharp, people trying to make sense of what was going on.
HZ: Yeah, because you hear a lot of 19th Century female authors taking on male pseudonyms.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That was quite common, but the reverse was a lot less common.
HZ: Yes, because no one would publish you.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Right?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: There is one that I know: Grant Allen published one book under a female name, was already a writer at the time, continued to write under his own name, but released one book as a woman as part of this sort of literary navigation of the concept of the new woman. But that's the only one that I know of from the time who had a female pseudonym. They're not very common at all.
HZ: And it's interesting that in a not particularly hospitable time for female authors, Fiona does so much better than William.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: A lot of people have said that Fiona Macleod was a marketing ploy because Fiona's work was so much more popular and so much more artistically interesting than Sharp's. I would question the degree to which people say, "Oh, this is a marketing ploy," because there are so few women writing in the Celtic Renaissance, which is usually associated with figures like Yeats, for example, WB Yeats.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: A lot of people thought that she was potentially actually a pseudonym of William Butler Yeats, who was a major figure in the Irish Celtic revival and was in correspondence with Fiona Macleod a lot. And they were often spoken about in the same breath, kind of Yeats as the Irish side, and Fiona Macleod as the Scottish side.
HZ: Fiona was a lot more professionally successful, and, it sounds, personally popular than William – did he mind? I'd be really upset!
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I think there is a certain degree to which he didn't really mind. Primarily because a lot of the work that William Sharp was doing, he was really unhappy with. So you see quite a lot of him saying, I want to write something better and more interesting and more cutting edge. But he can't, because he has to make money. He's not like somebody like, I don't know, Swinburne who has enough monetary backing to do whatever he wants. Sharp is having to support himself on his writing, he doesn't have any other money to fall back on. So he writes these potboilers and these not very good pieces of work because he has to get them out very quickly, because otherwise he's not going to eat. And that's for quite a large period of Sharp's life.
So I think the Fiona Macleod name allowed Sharp to make these artistic choices. He'd made some money by this point, and now he has the flexibility to say, okay, I'm gonna write these artistically more viable works. But he doesn't want them to be tarnished with his own bad reputation as a hack writer. So that is one theory why it's published directly under Fiona Macleod, is that it's an attempt to get away from his own reputation. So I don't think that there's necessarily the dynamic of Sharp wishing he'd had that career under his own name, because there is a degree to which the Fiona Macleod name is more reflective of the kind of person and the kind of work that William wanted to write, wanted to create.
About the being more personally liked: William Sharp is very much one of those people who doesn't really seem to notice when he's disliked. There's quite a lot of quite interesting letters where he's just being extremely friendly and extremely open with people and extremely vivacious with people, and them just not reacting with the same energy, and him just going on regardless. But then Fiona, in her letters, doesn't show the same kind of friendliness. It is kind of like Fiona is a relief from having to try to be liked all time.
HZ: So interesting, isn’t it, because usually women have been socialized to be likable, and more ingratiating.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Absolutely. And there is a degree to which in some letters Fiona can be like that, but in a completely different way from Sharp; hers is much more businesslike. Whereas William is always being like, “Please like me. Please tell me I'm good enough.”
HZ: People can smell the need.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Yeah. Whereas Fiona is much more self confident. And I think that's one of the most interesting parts about when you read the letters next to each other, they do read like different people. Fiona does read like a much more comfortable person in herself and a much more confident person in herself, and a lot more attuned to other people rather than just sort of railroading through with this attempt to be liked. It might also be knowing, for example, that female writers are treated much less seriously. So it's perhaps a sense that she has to force people to take her seriously by being a very business-minded, practical person and not have these bubbly approaches to people for fear that they might – to use a modern word – consider her to be a bit of an airhead, because bless him, William Sharp does sometimes come across as a bit of an airhead.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And Fiona Macleod also carried on correspondence with other people, particularly women and particularly women writers, and did develop literary friendships and associations. William Butler Yeats tells a story of essentially of meeting Fiona; he said that he would sit with William Sharp and a ‘Fiona mood’ would come upon William and then Yeats would speak with Fiona Macleod. And then when the Fiona mood left, William Sharp would come back and would have no memory of what went before. Elizabeth Sharp disputes that and says no, he never didn't remember, but there were certainly these moods of Fiona that came upon upon him.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Fiona does have a lot of friendships with a lot of people, primarily women, and is an entire person, or is presented as an entire person in her own right. This is one of those places where we have to think: if this was just a marketing ploy or if this was just a pseudonym for Sharp, why go to all of the trouble of forming these social relationships as Fiona, sending all of these letters as Fiona, in Fiona's handwriting – which was generally the handwriting of Sharp's sister Mary. William Sharp would write a draft and that would go to Mary. She would hand write it, and that would then be sent to whoever Fiona was corresponding with.
HZ: And I wonder whether – because now you don't see people's handwriting that often, but back then, they were probably a lot more kind of alert to how you would characterize people from their handwriting.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: I think it's partly that; I think they wanted a feminine hand – for want of a better word – or what would be perceived as a feminine hand. I think it was also that Fiona Macleod and William Sharp would write to the same people, and so they needed the handwriting to look different, to preserve the secret.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: And it's just extremely interesting to look at this process of identity creation. Fiona is acting in the world as a woman – and acting in the world very aggressively. She's making her own publishing deals, she's making her own pitches for stories to magazines. She's making connections with people, often people that William Sharp didn't always know, and couldn't necessarily make connections with as William Sharp, but Macleod is making all of these connections as a person in her own right.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Some people were in on the secret. Usually the people who were closest to William and Elizabeth Sharp. Some people kind of worked it out and found their way into the secret, and some people were let in on it.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: One example is Richard le Gallienne, who read Macleod's first novel and thought to himself, "I know this writer, I know who wrote this." And he commented to a magazine that he thought that it was William Sharp and not Fiona Macleod, as was written on the spine. And William Sharp very hastily telegrammed, and I think his exact words were, "For God's sake, shut your mouth." But everybody else found out after William Sharp's death. He had handwritten note cards to the people he was closest to tell them in person after his death that he wrote as Macleod. Everybody else found out through the newspaper.
HZ: As for William Sharp's wife Elizabeth: what was her relationship to or with Fiona Macleod?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: As far as we can tell, Elizabeth was extremely supportive. Elizabeth Sharp was William Sharp's cousin, they didn’t know each other as children particularly well, but they had been very close from like their late teens. The impression that you get from Elizabeth Sharp's biography of William Sharp is that Elizabeth is extremely protective of both William and Fiona and is very open to the peculiarities that are going on.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Elizabeth Sharp, the wife, publishes a memoir of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod, a huge biography of their writing life. And the first half, the first book is entitled William Sharp, and the second book is entitled Fiona Macleod. The whole of it has a frontispiece with a portrait of William Sharp, signed Fiona Macleod. So it's this book in two halves.
The biography, it's partially, I think, a sort of rehabilitation. It's in the wake of a literary scandal. It's an attempt to make the story make a bit more sense to the audience, and also I think to dismiss what was some of the more scurrilous ideas that were going around at the time. The biography is filled with William's own descriptions of his life as Fiona and Fiona's own descriptions of how Fiona thought about herself, and also descriptions of how Elizabeth thought of both of them. It's not easy to make sense of in contemporary terms, but the clearest way I can put it is that, as William Sharp and Fiona Macleod thought of it, they saw themselves as two aspects of the same person. They had very different writing careers, and they wrote about quite different things. And they saw themselves as friends and collaborators who sort of happened to inhabit the same body.
There's a number of different ways that we can kind of read that now, and in fact read it at the time: some people wondered if there was some kind of what we would know call transgender impulse going on some sexological peculiarity. And the science of sexology was really emerging at the time. Some people, both now and at the time, read this as what we call now a plural identity or what sometimes gets pathologized as dissociative identity disorder. And that too is an emerging science at the time, and people wrote about William and Fiona as potentially some example of the dual personality. And people also spoke about it as a kind of spiritual possession, that William Sharp was kind of possessed by the spirit of the land, this Gaelic Highland spirit Fiona Macleod, to write these books. That's particularly how William Butler Yeats would often talk about this.
But I think it's worth hearing some of William's own words on this. Here's one letter that William Sharp wrote about Fiona Macleod, he said: "This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic ecstasy and elation, this wayfaring across the extreme verges of the common world, all this is so wrought up with the romance of life that I could not bring myself to expression by my outer self, insistent and tyrannical as that need is... My truest self, the self who is below all other selves and my most intimate life and joys and sufferings, thoughts, emotions, and dreams, must find expression, yet I cannot, save in this hidden way."
HZ: Wow. It's pretty beautiful stuff. It's like standing in a high wind.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It is, it is. And that's how they both write a lot of the time, a really romantic view of themselves and of the world. They wrote letters to each other, William and Fiona, on their mutual birthday, they would write letters to each other. And their final letter to each other in, in 1905 – this is William writing to Fiona, which I think again helps to understand how he saw Fiona: "All that is best in this past year is due to you, mo caraid dileas" – 'my loyal friend' that is Gaelic –
and I hope and believe that seeds have been sown, which will be reborn in flower and fruit, and maybe green grass in waste places and may even grow to forests. I have not always your serene faith and austere eyes, dear, but I come to much in and through my weakness as through your strength, but we'll be one and the same au fond even then, shall we not, Fiona dear? Together, we shall be good Sowers, Fionaghal mo rùn, and let us work contentedly at that. I wish you Joy and Sorrow, Peace, and Unrest, and Leisure, Sun, and Wind, and Rain, all Earth and Sea and Sky in this coming year. And inwardly dwell with me so that less and less I may fall short of your need as well as your ideal. And may our "Mystic's Prayer" be true for us both who are one.
HZ: "Peace and unrest."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Peace and unrest. And that's William writing so romantically. Fiona's reply to William is somewhat harsher and mostly scolds him for being lazy, which is quite an interesting pairing.
HZ: It's just very upsetting when your alter ego is mean to you.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Absolutely. But I think he used Fiona to push himself along sometimes. So in these letters there's very much this sense of two in one. And at the same time, there's a lot in William’s letters and in Elizabeth Sharp's memoir where he say things like, "Sometimes I imagine that I am half a woman." And in a description of him going about London, Elizabeth Sharp says, "There was scarcely a day that went by where he did not try to imagine himself as a woman."
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: It seems that William Sharp was extremely open with Elizabeth about the presence of Fiona Macleod, and indeed about the presence of a general femininity within himself. And it seems that she was extremely supportive of this side of William's and very supportive of the presence of Fiona and not concerned about it, except when it comes to the fact that the presence of Fiona meant that William was working two people's careers at the same time.
HZ: William had been ill since childhood – a series of illnesses including scarlet fever, rheumatic fever and typhoid left him in fragile health. And then he had the strain of writing enough for two authors.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: But there doesn't seem to have been any particular emotional strain on Elizabeth except this general sense of concern and love for her husband, her wife, however you want to express that. There's only this concern for the physical strain of being in the closet, essentially.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So this is how Elizabeth explains the two selves:
In surveying the dual life as a whole, I have seen how from the early partially realized twin ship, WS was the first to go adventuring and find himself, while his twin FM remained passive or a separate self. When she awoke to active consciousness, she became the deeper, the more impelling, the more essential factor. By reason of this severance and of the acute conflict that at times resulted therefrom, the flaming of the dual life became so fierce that Wilfion, as I named the inner and third self that lay behind that dual expression, realized the imperativeness of gaining control over his two separated selves and of bringing them into some kind of conscious harmony.
So Elizabeth names this third self as a sort of nonbinary Wilfion, a pure artistic personality that fuses masculine and feminine, that fuses Highland and Lowland in a kind of Scottish idea at the time, and an artistic idea at the time, into this one figure Wilfion. And I should say that William or maybe Fiona, or maybe both of them, at least once sign a letter to Elizabeth Sharp as Wilfion. So that is also a name that they use for themselves.
HZ: With all the provisos that we can't know for certain William's gender identity, and all of that: do you think that Elizabeth's observable attitude towards it all suggests that the late Victorians may have been more thoughtful about gender fluidity than we imagine them in retrospect?
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: I absolutely think that that is the case, certainly within certain groups of people. So the Sharps were very much within, for example, feminist circles. So they were very politically open-minded, shall we say. And I think there is a lot more flexibility within the Victorian conception of gender, especially in the late Victorian period, than we really give it any particular credit for. For example, if we look at a lot of sexological discourse from this period, while it's not fantastic to read as a modern day person, it's also a lot more fluid with regards to gender than we think of it as being.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But I think Elizabeth and people around William and Fiona supported and agreed with this idea. And there were a lot of ideas at that time in art and culture of androgyny, of a union of masculine and feminine of trying to overcome that binary being an artistic ideal, that that's an idea that comes up a lot in the literature of the time. So I think people were kind of on board with that as a literary artistic project.
HZ: I asked Josie what the response had been in the literary world when, upon William Sharp’s death in 1905, he was revealed to have been Fiona Macleod.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Some people just take this as a kind of beautiful expression of an artistic ideal. A lot of people continue to speak of Fiona Macleod's work in high terms and continue to talk about it as worked with a great deal of value.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: There was a mix of, "Oh, we knew it," because it had been speculated that Fiona and William Sharp were the same person, or some sort of a personal link between them. So there was a certain degree of, "Yes, we could have figured that out on our own." And a mix of, for some people, a sense of betrayal or a sense of, “I can't believe I was taken in by that.” But in all in all, it is mostly respectful.
HZ: William Sharp’s wife Elizabeth Sharp published her affectionate biography of William and Fiona in 1910, and released volumes of selected writings of Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. But over time, the public attitude towards them and their work did become more negative.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: From the early to mid 1910s, publication of Sharp and Macleod's works been dropping off. But it's only really in the 1930s that it starts to become controversial. After Elizabeth Sharp died in the 1930s, this is when we start seeing rejection of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod. So it's very much sort of a, "We can only be disrespectful once Elizabeth Sharp is no longer there to make us feel ashamed of ourselves."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: As the years pass, there's more and more criticism, and I think particularly of what is more manufactured, or what we might now say appropriated, in Fiona Macleod's work – that you start to see questioning of the authenticity of the work. And this is as ideas of authenticity are starting to gain more traction in literature, in art. And I think less the gender material, actually, I think less the trans aspect of what's going on, and more the questioning of the authenticity of the Celtic material itself starts to undermine Fiona Macleod's reputation. And even though people wrote about her at the time as one of Scotland's most important writers, she passes remarkably quickly out of the literary canon, to the point where most people have never heard of Fiona Macleod.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Fiona goes from being one of the absolute figureheads of the Celtic Renaissance to being almost completely forgotten about.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: And yet, there are echoes. There are echoes of Fiona Macleod and William Sharp. And the name Fiona is just one of them, that it is now an ordinary name. And I don't think that anyone should come away from this conversation not wanting to use the name Fiona. I think this is a beautiful and rich history. It might not be quite the history that you imagined, but I think it's a beautiful history. I can't get them out of my head because they seem to me to teach us so much about Scottishness and Scottish literature.
HZ: To recap: William Sharp was a Protestant Lowlander also writing as the Catholic Highlander Fiona Macleod.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is something uncomfortable about that, and I think we should find that a bit uncomfortable. This was happening before language around cultural appropriation was used, and this kind of writing across cultural lines was not so uncommon at the time. But there is something uncomfortable about it. And particularly there's something uncomfortable, I think, about someone from a largely Lowland background, who was not a fluent Gaelic speaker, trying to be this prophetess of the Celtic revival and trying to write authentically as a Gael and trying to take on that role.
HZ: By writing as Fiona Macleod, William Sharp was able to publish without being sullied by his reputation as an uncelebrated hack writer of potboilers and whatever else he could pay the bills with. And Moll Heaton-Callaway sees further reasons for William and Fiona to have been kept distinct.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: One thing I speculate in my thesis is that this was a way to distance Fiona Macleod from William Sharp not only professionally but also personally, to make these distinctions so that Fiona Macleod was not too much like the woman that William Sharp would've been had he been assigned female; to give personal emotional distance.
But there is also a sense that William Sharp in his writings, in his letters, for example, never seems to consider himself fully Scottish. He is Scottish, but he's Lowlands Protestant rather than Highlands Catholic. And it's quite clear in his writing that he considers Highlands Catholicism to be like the highest form of Scottishness, the purest form of Scottishness. And so it could potentially be an attempt to allow himself access to Scottishness that he doesn't necessarily have in his daily life, and also in his daily publishing. He's very much beholden to the London market. The London market at that period doesn't want anything to be particularly... questioning of the colonial project, let's put it that way. So Welsh literature shouldn't sound too Welsh, Scottish literature shouldn't sound too Scottish; it should sound just Scottish enough or just Welsh enough to be exotic. But it shouldn't be problematic for the London market. So, William Sharp's literary career as William Sharp often underplayed his Scottishness. And sometimes you'll come across some of his writing that seems anti-Scottish. But I think you kind of have to interpret that in the light of this is a person who is constantly having to write for whatever opportunity will come up. And so there is this little bit of self denial in that, that I think Fiona's incredible Scottishness, her sort of ‘ideal’ Scottishness, is intended to counteract that in some ways.
HZ: So William is both not Scottish enough and too Scottish.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Not Scottish enough for himself or for his own artistic desires, but too Scottish for London. So Fiona is this gateway into kind of Scottishness that William Sharp has kind of been personally and professionally denied.
HZ: Elizabeth edited these books with Celtic poetry and stuff. But did the two of them spend that much time in the Highlands?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: No! No, they did not. They went there on holiday. They both mention William's time in the Highlands when he was a child, and they both mention the influence of a Gaelic nurse or a Gaelic fisherman, a Gaelic-speaking fisherman that William spent time with. And this is usually mentioned to kind of ground the authenticity of the Fiona Macleod project. They were constantly striving for that authenticity, but I think it's rather more dubious than they would like us to believe.
HZ: It's interesting, isn't it, that all these things that Fiona had that were perceived disadvantages, like more Scottishness, femaleness, worked great for her professionally.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Absolutely, absolutely. I do think it is interesting, and I do think it is perhaps a sign that Fiona's works were so good that they kind of overcame these disadvantages. Or you might also interpret it that they reinforced some of these exotic ideas about Celticism, and these exotic ideas about Celtic femininity. Celticism is very much associated with femininity. There's all of these stereotypes of airy, psychic Celtic femininity. And you might say that Macleod's work is playing into all of those tropes, and it absolutely is.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So something that is going on here, and that I think ties into this Highland/Lowland Gaelic/ English binary, is that male/female gets written into that binary as well, and so femininity in the mind usually of Lowland writers becomes associated with Gaelic culture, with the Highlands, with the natural. And this definitely exists in William Sharp's mind as a binary as well. And so Fiona Macleod almost becomes this kind of natural expression of William Sharp's emotionality; and coded into a Gaelic writer, his emotionality, which is maybe suspect as a man, becomes authentic as a Celtic woman. That's kind of what's happening there, I think. With hindsight, I would want to problematize all of these binaries and would say that the way that Gaelic culture is identified with the feminine and identified with the natural is a colonial binary, and is part of the system of thinking that continually erodes Gaelic culture.
I think it's also the case that a huge part of Scottish literary history, that so much of what we understand of Celtic mythology now, has been relayed through people who were not Gaels and has been relayed through a colonial framework; that our very way of thinking about Gaelic life has been colonized partly through centuries of literature, and this goes a long way back to the beginning of the Celtic Revival. James Macpherson's Tales of Ossian, which is this totemic work of literary romanticism and this foundation of the Celtic revival, and was supposedly an English translation of myths and stories and legends and a translation of an original epic from the Gaelic: but what we know now is that Macpherson fabricated a huge amount of the Tales of Ossian. Potentially the first part of it was a kind of stitching together of actual Gaelic songs and stories. But some of it was fabricated out of whole cloth. And certainly the way that Macpherson put it all together in English was his creation.
HZ: It’s fine if he'd put "inspired by real mythology", if that's not too contradictory.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It would've been helpful. And there's been centuries of debate since about how much of Ossian was fabricated by Macpherson and how much of it predates Macpherson. And it makes it harder sometimes to get to Gaelic originals beneath the kind of English super-imposition. That's still true today. And there are still people who don't know that Ossian is largely a fabrication. And this is so much of Scottish literature. At the same time, there is and has always been a continuing Gaelic literature, which has rarely had as much attention as the interpretations of Gaelic literature as made by people who didn't have Gaelic, by English speakers.
HZ: It's reminding me of that kid that made up all that Scots language wikipedia recently.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's a very good contemporary version of the same dynamic, I think.
HZ: In August 2020 it was revealed that some 23,000 articles, about a third of the articles on Scots Wikipedia, had been cobbled together in a mixture of English gobbledygook and English rendered into Scots through translation software. The perpetrator was an American teenager who didn't speak any Scots.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's actually a really good example, because that American kid wanted to be doing good, like really wanted to be strengthening the Scots language, creating more resources in the Scots language, and didn't know enough to understand the damage that he was doing and the way that the work that he was doing was creating a false corpus for the language.
HZ: That's clear to see because we are alive at the same time as those events unfurled. But yeah, when you're looking back to late 1700s with James Macpherson, it's cloudier.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: So much cloudier. In that cloud, in that mist, we have this name, Fiona.
HZ: Because the fIrst known appearance in writing of the word 'Fiona' is actually in the English version of James Macpherson's Tales of Ossian that he published in the 1760s.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There is one usage of the word Fiona, actually with the two little dots over the o, the diacritical mark, so we know it's supposed to be pronounced fee-OH-na. It's a really passing reference. It's just used once, and in fact, in the Gaelic version of Ossian, which we now think Macpherson back translated from the English, it's not used at all.
HZ: Oh! How does he do the line instead? Because the line that I've seen is: "Let the sighs of Fiöna rise on the dark heaths of her lovely Ardan."
HARRY JOSIE GILES: That's the line. So there's a different name in that place, the name is Eibhir, which is E I B H I R, which is another name I can't figure out where Macpherson got that from. It's possible that he invented both names out of whole cloth. The versions of Eibhir that I've seen are masculine versions, so it's a little bit obscure where that comes from.
HZ: And is Fïona weather here? Or some kind of divine force? Or supposed to be to be human in this line?
HARRY JOSIE GILES: In the first edition of Ossian that I can find, there's a footnote to Fiona, which translates it 'a fair maid'. Now, whether that 'a fair maid' is referring to a person called Fiona, or whether Fiona is a kind of epithet for a fair maid, or whatever Macpherson intended, is a little bit hard to find.
HZ: Right.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But as far as I can tell, Macperson puts together the word, just fabricates the word.
HZ: He's got practice.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah, yeah, exactly, he fabricates a whole epic. And I can't find a written example of Fiona in that usage before Macpherson. It looks like there’s some derivation from a Gaelic word for ‘white’ in there, that something like that may be going on. Confusingly, in the Gaelic version of Ossian, there's another use of that sequence of letters, but in the context, it's very clear that that's supposed to be pronounced FEE-na. In the English that gets translated as Fiona-Bràgail, and in the Gaelic, it's just as Fiona [FEE-na], F I O N A, without the accent. So that's in there in Macpherson's creation as well.
And then also confusingly, Macpherson uses the same sequence of letters to refer to what we now call the Fèinne, the sort of wandering Warrior Bands. In Scots Gaelic, it's pronounced FAYN-ye; generally you'd find it in English as FYEN-a now. But, in some of the notes on some of the editions of parts of Ossian, Macpherson writes that as F I O N A as well. So it's possible that either of those are getting muddled up in what Macpherson is doing. It's a little bit obscure.
There's also, I found one set of that sequence of letters in an older Gaelic text, with reference to a male figure actually is an alternative name for the Saxon Alfred. Alfred in a couple of older Irish texts actually is referred to as Flann Fiona, F I O N A, son of Ossa, King of Saxonland. But all of these are very different usages and are different spellings and don't have the accent that tells us that this is supposed to be pronounced Fiona [fee-OH-na].
HZ: The Welsh name Ffion, F F I O N, is a modern one when given to girls; it means 'foxglove'. But the male name Ffion is old, more than a thousand years old in Welsh and Breton.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah, yeah. So that is a male name. A lot of my research here owes a debt to a researcher called Sharon Krossa, who did some of the earlier work on the origins of the name Fiona. And I am not an expert in Gaelic by any means. I'm just a Gaelic learner, and my pronunciations and my knowledge are quite weak.
HZ: Better than mine.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: But Sharon Krossa does understand the medieval origins of these names and words a lot better than me, and has done quite a fine piece of etymology arguing that to form a female name from Ffion or Fionn with just by adding an -A to it: that's not something that happens, that's not how a Gaelic feminine is formed. And we can't find any examples of anyone actually doing that to Fionn to make Fiona.
So this is the other complication that comes in there: there is an old Gaelic name, which is Fionnghal. And that is the Gaelic name, the English equivalent of which – there's a tradition of Gaelic names having English equivalents – that would usually be given in English as Flora, which is the old name. So usually when somebody uses Fionnghal in the Gaelic context, they would use Flora in an English context. William Sharp claimed occasionally that Fiona was an abbreviation of Fionnghal. I can't find any evidence of anyone doing that before Fiona Macleod. And again, according to Sharon Krossa, it's just not how you would form a diminutive from Fionnghal. It doesn't make sense in a Gaelic linguistic context. And we already had Flora to do that work.
HZ: In case this isn't complicated enough, Flora and Fionnghal may be used as equivalents, but they have different meanings – Flora is from the Latin for 'flower' whereas Fionnghal means 'white-shouldered', being the Scottish form of the Irish name Fionnghuala [other spellings include Fionnuala or Finola], which IS centuries old and female-assigned, and means white-shouldered – this might have been an expression for someone having fair hair. In Irish mythology, Fionnghuala was turned into a swan for 900 years, I guess swans have white shoulders, if they have shoulders? Do swans have shoulders? A question for another time!
There's also the old Irish male name Fionnan or Finnian, which also means pale or fair, there are several saints called it from the 5th, 6th, 7th centuries – and the name Finn which has various different origins that all ended up as the modern 'Finn', but one origin is the aforemented Ffion.
There is also an early Gaelic name [FEEN-ya], spelled Fíne, that meant 'vine', so etymologically unrelated to Fiona, which means 'white' if you believe all the baby name lists.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: This is probably the same thing going on where people are taking this word for white, where Finn and Fionn come from, and assuming that's that's what the meaning of Fiona is. And that's possibly why Macpherson uses it. And that's possibly why we get 'a fair maid' as a translation of Fiona, 'fair' and 'white' being kind of connected there. Sharp gives it as the same meaning that Macpherson does: he says it's a fair maid. So in some letters he says, "Fiona means a fair maid, it's an ancient Scottish name, I've heard it, there's a minister's daughter just the next island over who has the name Fiona." This is something he says every so often. So sometimes he says it means a fair maid, at other times he says it's a diminutive of Fionnghal. And in fact, he does write a letter to Fiona, in which he addresses her as ‘Fionaghal NicLeòid’ which is a Gaelic version of Fiona Macleod. So he does sometimes call her Fionaghal.
HZ: A letter from Fiona Macleod says:
It may interest you to know that the name which seems to puzzle so many people is (though it does exist as the name “Fiona,” not only in Ossian but at the present day, though rarely) the Gaelic diminutive of “Fionaghal” (i.e. Flora). “Fiona,” however, and not “Fionaghal,” is my name.
Note that the letter asys the name “seems to puzzle” – this I think does indicate the name Fiona was not common – if it did exist at all – before Fiona Macleod, because contemporaries of Fiona Macleod, William Sharp, really struggled with it – they couldn't pronounce it, couldn't spell it...
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: They just don't seem to know how to pronounce it, which is very strange, considering how it seems to be one of the most intuitive names to pronounce.
HZ: Yes. There's no silent letters…
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Exactly. Not a single one.
HZ: Even the vowels don't come with the ambiguity that a lot of words do.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: No. They don't. They absolutely don’t!
HZ: It's short.
MOLL HEATON-CALLAWAY: Yeah. It definitely doesn't seem as intuitive to people in the 1890s as it is later on. There might have been young girls in the Highlands who had been called Fiona and they'd just never been reported on a census; so it might be that Fiona was being used as a nickname for a longer name for an extremely long time and had just never been a Christian name. But this was just not a name that was in use.
HZ: Why do you think people want this name to be old? Like old-old – because for some people, late 19th century is old – but, old-old.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: I think people want it to be old for exactly the same reason that William Sharp created Fiona Macleod. They want a connection to Celtic authenticity. I think that's what William Sharp was reaching for. William Sharp, as best I can tell, plucked the name out of Ossian. But whether that was consciously or not, William Sharp did edit an edition of Ossian, and he edited an edition of Ossian where there is that accent over the O of Fiöna. So I think when he was looking for an authentic Celtic Gaelic name, he reached for Fiona because it's mentioned in Ossian and because he didn't really want to believe that Ossian itself was a bit of a fabrication. It's fabrication all the way down.
But Scottishness is made up all the way down, that whenever you go searching for kind of authenticity or ideas of Scottishness, you find someone telling a story that's a little bit shaky. And it also means to me that there is transness at a really pivotal moment in Scottish literature and that some of the binaries that have now become almost a cliche in Scottish literary analysis – Catholic/Protestant, Highland/Lowland, English/Gaelic, male/female as well – these cliches of what gets called the Caledonian Antisyzygy, in a wonderfully overblown term, are really embodied in this one creation of Willfion, of William Sharp and Fiona Macleod.
HZ: Caledonian Antisyzergy, noun: “The presence of duelling polarities within one entity, considered to be characteristic of the Scottish temperament.”
HARRY JOSIE GILES: There's a last story that I think is really worth telling. It kind of sums up the whole story to me. So they're on holiday in the Highlands, and they're out walking and they spy a boat, a little rowing boat that's on a loch. And they squint at the boat, and they squint at the name of the boat and they think, “It can't be, can it? Can it?” And they get closer and closer and they look at it and they realize that yes, indeed this little rowing boat on this little loch is named Fiona.
And they go closer and they realize that there's a man in the boat, and William Sharp, not giving the game away at all, says, "Oh, that's a very pretty name on your boat there. Where did you get that name from? Is it a real name?" And the man says, "Yes, it's a real name. It's an old Highland name." And Sharp says, "Do you know anyone who has that name then?" And the man in the boat says, "Yeah, there's a daughter of a minister over the way that's called Fiona." And Sharp says, "Oh, so it'll be after her then that the boat's named?" And the man in the boat says, "No, no, it's not named after her." "Oh," says Sharp, "is it named after your mother or your grandmother?" And the man says, "No, no, no. It's named after this great writer lady from Iona."
And apparently this man read a story of Fiona Macleod's in the Oban Times – Oban being a town in the West Highlands – and decided to name the boat after her. So in this search for authenticity, in this search for the real use of the name of Fiona, all that William Sharp can come back to is themself.
HZ: What a fan encounter.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: It's beautiful, isn't it? And I just love the way that you can see in the questions that Sharp is so desperate, so desperate to find some authentication of this name Fiona, and can only encounter Fiona Macleod. But then, maybe Fiona Macleod is authenticity enough for the name.
HZ: Yeah. I mean, all names had to start somewhere. They were all made.
HARRY JOSIE GILES: Yeah.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
romer, noun: a small piece of plastic or card bearing perpendicularly aligned scales or (if transparent) a grid, used to determine the precise reference of a point within the grid printed on a map. Origin 1930s: named after its British inventor Carrol Romer.
Eponym alert! Try using ‘romer’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com and the experimental podcast Neutrino Watch, and the podcast we make together, Answer Me This. Thanks to Harry Josie Giles and Moll Heaton-Calloway.
Our ad partner is Multitude. To sponsor this show, whereby I will talk affectionately and persuasively about your product or thing, contact them at multitudeshows.com/ads.
You can listen to or read every episode and get more information about the topics and people therein, see photos of the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, contact me to tell me about your name or whatever else you care to share, and donate to receive a bunch of perks and get the ad-free feed and get the medieval Paul Hollywood drawings, help this podcast stay afloat, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
