SHELLEY, Percy Bysshe - SHARP, William.

£450 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. First edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author to a fellow poet, Shelley critic, and literary biographer, "To Mathilde Blind. With the admiration & affection of her friend, William Sharp. Oct 27, '87". Blind was a recognized authority on poetry among her contemporaries, lecturing on Shelley and editing A Selection from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1872).Blind (1841-1896), who wrote the first biography of George Eliot in 1883, was widely read and praised in Britain and America for her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889), a feminist response to Darwin. She was a prominent voice in the New Woman movement, a feminist ideal of the late 19th century that included figures such as Vernon Lee, Amy Levy, and Olive Schreiner. Like Shelley, Blind's "burning sense of political and social injustice runs like a unifying thread through her work" (Orlando).Blind's literary and political careers paralleled that of her close friend William Sharp (1855-1905), who later wrote her eulogy. A women's rights activist, Sharp published under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod from 1893, but his erstwhile friend William Butler Yeats likely sensed Macleod's true identity. "The production of the female persona of Fiona seems to have caused Sharp frequent ill health, culminating in a near total breakdown in 1897-8; moreover, he had a feeling of being haunted by past lives" (ODNB).

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