No Mudcat thread for this author? there is one now.

During the 1900's (Sharp died in 1905 at the age of fifty years),
Sharp's literary work sort of went underground.
To authors like Neil Munro Gunn he remained significant,
but he was forgotten by many others.

Today there are numerous studies and books about him
and editions of his work.
One of the more recent publications is of all of his letters.
In his short life he published a lot of writing.
The trick is that the work was published under two names:
his own, and that of

'Fiona Macleod.'
Sharp and his loved ones (sister as well as wife) went to great trouble
to keep the public from guessing that 'Fiona' was himself;
but he provided that after his death, the deception should end.


The (United States) Library of Congress contains
61 catalogue records under William Sharp's name, and
42 catalogue records under Fiona Macleod's name, according to Wikipedia;
what I do not know, is if any of these duplicate each other.

How did Sharp, born and raised in Paisley, learn the Scottish Gaelic?
In The Little Book of the Great Enchantment, biographer Steve Blamires writes:

[...]his constant companion was his old Highland nurse Barbara. She taught him the Gaelic of the Isles and told him the old stories of Celtic and Viking heroes and warriors and filled his young mind with the Gaelic folklore, charms, and sayings that later so influenced the writing of Fiona Macleod. We know nothing about this influential character from his early days or even why a Gaelic speaking Highlander should end up as nurse for a Lowland family in Paisley. It is probable that Barbara's family had been cleared from its native Highland home and she, like so many others, had found her way down to the cities of the Central Lowlands in search of employment. [page 25]

Both English and the Scottish Gaelic feature in Sharp's fiction,
as in the first Fiona Macleod novel, Pharais.
The novel presents verse in Scottish Gaelic framed by
English prose, and the verses are presented as utterances
by the fictional characters, largely Islanders.
Each piece of Scottish Gaelic verse
includes a prose English translation, embedded in the story.

To keep this OP from getting overly long, I conclude with the observation that
William Butler Yeats encountered Sharp early on,
and there was tremendous ambivalence and tension between the two,
as their relationship was stormy and contentious.
Yeats guessed that 'Fiona Macleod', whose publications he read,
was William Sharp, even before Sharp died;
and Yeats was, shall we say, indignant about the deception.